00071 Design your personal permaculture learning experience

The Process of Design

As iPermie unfolds, I describe the permaculture design process in great detail over several chapters. This starts right now with this preview of the coming design attractions.

The permaculture design process has five steps —

• Observation
• Study and Evaluation
• Design
• Implementation

iPermie uses the acronym OSEDI to help us remember this process.

Observation.

You know yourself better than anyone else. You begin at the beginning with a detailed observation of YOU yourself yourself. This may sound easy, but it isn’t. Don’t discount the difficulty of observing yourself.

Begin with goals. What are your goals in studying permaculture? What do you want to get out of this permaculture education process?

Set short, medium, and long term goals. “I want to work my way through iPermie in 14 months.” “In the next month, I want to finish section 0.” “Before I go to bed tonight, I will read 00081.”

Set some more longer term, more challenging goals, such as “end my dependence on the international food system within five years.”

Or . . . “Within ten years, organize the geographies of my life so that I can live without a private vehicle.

What functions are necessary for these purposes? This is a slightly different question than the identification of goals. A goal could be a statement that you intend to finish the iPermie process in two years. A function is something that is necessary for this goal to be achieved.

For example, you may list "Reading iPermie materials" as one of your functions in support of your goals. You can further refine it: Will you try to read a certain amount every day or every week? Will you make that decision by yourself or with others in your permaculture learning community. And so that process goes, until you have a list of all of the critical functions involved with learning permaculture. You don't have to have a lot of things to do. You just want the most important functions necessary to help you learn permaculture.

For each goal and function, identify the activities and elements necessary to realize that goal.

Elements are individual things in your design.

For example, you could set up a study space, where you would place all of the items you need to study permaculture. That study space is an element in your design. You may need items like colored pencils and graph paper to do maps and diagrams. They are elements too. So are you.

Ask yourself: How do you learn new fields of study? How do you handle incoming knowledge when it shows up in copious quantities and appears complicated? What do you need to make this learning experience work for you?

What is your perception of the structure of iPermie?

How much time do you want to devote to this? What other demands are there on your time and attention?

Make a written record of your observations. You might as well go ahead and start a journal. You’ll need it later.

Permaculture is a holistic endeavor. Your observation of your ‘self’ in this and everything else regarding permaculture needs to be as comprehensive as possible. This takes praxis — action coupled with reflection on the experience (feedback!) followed by more action informed by the previous experience.

How will you praxis this information?

Is “praxis” a new concept to you? Do you think it will be troublesome for you? If so, how will you resolve that challenge? If you think it will be easy for you — how will you resolve that challenge? Sometimes “easy” is just as hard to manage as “difficult,” only the details are different.

Permaculture tells us to start at your doorstep. You, the person who learns, does, and is, becomes the place of beginning.

One observation technique that’s useful and fun is to pretend that you are already there, wherever it is you think you want to go! Boldly tell yourself — and others! — the most amazing stories that have yet to be realized about future changes in your life — changes that are not yet even planned, but are your wild dreams for the future.

Tell this tale as if it were history. I do some of this elsewhere in this and other sections. It helps you break out of the status quo emotionally so that you can effectively see your way forward into something better. It is the beginning of your own personal self-fulfilling prophecy of permaculture success.

This is a “vision experience” about how your learning of permaculture design changes your life. Don’t censor your thoughts. Let them flow freely into the best case scenario. . .

Your learning experience was so wonderful that you developed a permaculture design for your life that was generative and fruitful and happy and meaningful. As a result of permaculture design, throughout your life you experience more beauty, health, happiness, freedom, and cooperation, with less work, consumption, injustice, conflict, and waste.

People around you were so impressed by your life that they too learned permaculture design. As your works of justice, sustainability, and peace propagated across the planet, together with those of your neighbors, and your neighbors’ neighbors . . . genocides halted, tyranny collapsed, justice became possible and real for billions terrorized by evil, and the planet’s ecologies began to heal, renew, and restore.

It is a measure of how far we have to go that reading those two preceding paragraphs almost seems like the "dreaming an impossible dream." But the way that we bring dreams to life is to first be willing to dare to dream of the impossible. If we can see it in our heads, we can bring it to life.

This doesn't mean it will be easy. It does mean hope is in order.

Permaculture design offers you the opportunity to articulate the vision you have for your life and by extension, the lives of those you love.

Know your destination — where you want, in your heart of heart to be — so you will know that you have arrived when you get there. If you don’t know where to go, how will you know which road to take? How will you know you are there when you get there?

As you continue your observations. . . Make a list of the ways you sabotage your own efforts to make changes for the better in your life. Make a list of the ways that society holds you back and makes it harder to care for people, care for the planet, and care for the future. Knowing problems is the first step to finding solutions. Let us count these ways.

1. Your own feelings of disempowerment — helplessness — and hopelessness. The default design is to immediately feel hopeless and helpless and fears when we think about changing our lives in such a transformative way that we could impact the world around us for the better.
2. Family and friends. Others may be threatened by our movement toward transformative change. They may respond with discouragement, ridicule, challenge, and anger.
3. Resource limitations. You may think you don’t have enough time, enough money, and/or enough brain power, to learn permaculture design.
4. Denial. You may develop feelings of denial — “Things are not so bad that I have to change my life.”
5. Procrastination. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow or even better, next year? That’s a popular attitude. It is not a permaculture design principle.
6. Distractive activities. We don’t lack for distraction in this world. Five hundred channels on cable. Thousands of programs to download on the internet. Hundreds of millions of websites. Sports teams. Movie stars. Computer games. Music megastars. Oh yes, bread and circus is an old game and it reaches its most masterful demonstration in the modern era.
7. Compensatory activities. Learning about the problems we face can cause internal commotions and sometimes it is easier to just get drunk, stoned, or shop till you drop instead of facing realities and doing something about them. It doesn’t make things better. It makes things worse. But somehow we feel better about ourselves. Beware the siren song of compensatory activities that numb the mind too much too often.
8. Systemic limitations. As you start this journey, you may not find much in the way of systemic support. By this I refer to organizations, ideas, systems, and structures that make it easier to learn permaculture design and live more sustainably. There are plenty of organizations, ideas, systems, and structures out there that help you make bad, badder, and baddest decisions. We need more support for good, better, and best decisions.

You can safely ignore all the programming that says, “This is impossible. It can’t happen. You’ll never make it.” That’s the controlling voice of the domination and subjugation system preaching helplessness and hopelessness to you. It is a lie. Turn away from it.

Whew. That’s a lot of information. Always remember you don’t have to be in a hurry with any of this. This is your schedule on your timeline that fits the cycles of your life. Don’t stress. Permaculture design helps relieve stress in your life. It should not promote stress.

Study and Evaluation.

After Observation, in light of what you now know about yourself, you study your observations so you can evaluate them. We will learn a lot more about how to evaluate observations, but here at the beginning, mostly you need to discern the best way for you to proceed in this journey of permaculture education. Do this in accordance with your existing abilities and knowledge of how you participate in and experience learning opportunities.

The first layer of review is always ethical. Study your goals and functions in the light of the ethics of permaculture.

Prioritize! You can’t do everything, at least not at first. What’s most important? First things first, second things second and so on down your list. Always start with the high priority items.

As you study and evaluate, continue to drill down for each of the goals and functions, with their associated activities and elements. Refine your observations and increase the level of detail.

Look for common elements — beneficial connections as we say in permaculture. We like situations where multiple systems or elements provide each important function. We want each element or system to serve multiple functions or purposes. We prefer biological answers and small and slow solutions. We structure activities so that they are energy conservative. We act in accordance with the permaculture ethics. All of these can be filters for your lists and plans.

Examine your list of the expected barriers to your success and problems you may encounter. How do you weaken or remove them so you can do what you want to do? Write a plan to handle these kinds of problems.

Make a list of the resources you need. Start with “A learning community.” Go on to folders by subject, a journal, and study schedule. What else?

Study and Evaluation includes understanding that there are factors out there that work against change. The system is strong and well-practiced in discouraging all who would change their lives as the first step toward changing the world. Your learning plan should include ideas about overcoming the structural bias against change for the better built into the world’s systems and structures.

The Benefits of a Learning Community

Generally, in a conventional permaculture design course, students critique design work within the learning community that came together for the educational experience. you downloaded iPermie ebook does not come equipped with a community. That’s why one of the first two design challenges is to call together your own permaculture small group education community.

Therefore, an important right-up-front question is —

Do you want to attempt this by yourself or in company of others?

The Learning Community chapter (00081) suggests forming a small community of friends to work your way through this material. There are many good reasons for that, beginning with the detail that permaculture is a communitarian activity. Feedback is important to permaculture design and that works best in a group.

Maybe you already have a learning community at hand in the form of your family or household. If not, calling together such a community, or finding one, is important to the development of your permaculture learning experience.

You can meet in person, or you can be a cyber-community.

There are no permaculture police that will come in black helicopters and take you away for not starting or joining a small group permaculture learning community. It’s up to you what you want to do. My recommendation though is to go with the learning community option, even if you find that difficult at first.

Design

Permaculture designs are always written documents. There is too much detail in designs to carry the information around in your head.

Make specific decisions that lead to actual outcomes consistent with your goals and list of functions.

Designing small incremental steps is the wise way to go. Nibble at your situation one little bit at a time. Success at small achievable activities creates empowerment. Nothing succeeds like success. For example, a design decision could be: “Study written iPermie materials 30 minutes a day six days each week.”

Use the various lists of permaculture principles to develop strategies and plans to achieve goals and functions.

A good place to start is to make a list of things to stop doing and/or to minimize. Begin with — “Stop thinking that you are helpless.”

Don’t plan grand agendas. A common response to disempowerment is grandiosity. We plan such major projects that nobody could ever achieve them. Thus we prove our feelings of helplessness to be true. Sure, it's fine to stretch. There remains a difference between challenging yourself to do more and better and planning a grandiose adventure there is no chance of achieving.

Avoiding grand agenda's is not the same thing as abandoning your holistic vision for your future. You may indeed dream of a great day when a host of permaculture design-driven changes have come to fruition in your life and throughout your community. But your first step is not into that grand vision of the future. Your first step is into something you can achieve in the here and now, with the knowledge and resources you have know. This will be a baby step to carry you on to the next step, and the one after that, and so on and so forth until you reach the future of your dreams.

Work with the most important functions first, as in “these are the most critical things I need to do to learn permaculture design.”

Look for beneficial connections on your lists. If something shows up on three or more lists, zero in on it and see what it is and why it is important enough to show up multiple times. The more lists you see an item on, the more important that item is to the entire design.

Always look not only at the parts, endeavor to see the whole. We see trees but we may not understand the forest. The forest does not exist without the trees but it is more than any individual tree. The danger is that we focus on the trees and ignore the forest, which is what the default system design wants us to do. Seeing the world and your life as a whole system is not easy. You can learn to do this with practice, just like anything else. But you do have to practice at it. People rarely just magically acquire that sense (at least in our culture).

Don’t forget to count the cost in money and materials and time! Live within your budget — your finances, your access to energy, your time. Don’t bankrupt your bank account, your time, or the planet for the sake of your design.

Implement.

After you complete your design, Just Do It. Adapt it as necessary in response to feedback and outcomes. Everything you think of initially may not work out in practice. That’s fine. You did something. As a result, you learned something. So now you are ahead. Think and reflect about what you did and what happened. Next do something else. Learn more. Reflect again. And so it goes.

Listen to feedback. Observe outcomes. Continue to evaluate and redesign as necessary.

The Author’s Suggestion for Reading iPermie.

Read each document in the Basics and Invisible Structures sections first. Study the other sections in any order you please. If you don’t do the Basics and Invisible Structures first, the other sections will not be as useful to you. If you are in school, read the Education section third.

Many people will read through the whole collection of documents to get an overview of what is here. That’s a fine strategy. Most of us however will need to go back and study each chapter of the sections and work through the questions and design problems at the end of the section in order to get the full value of the information.

Study each chapter in a section until you understand it, then go on to the next chapter in sequence. If you have a hard time understanding a concept or a whole chapter, talk about it with others, either online or in your local learning community.

Don’t be in a hurry. We don’t have time to be in a hurry. You’ve spent your entire life learning to consume and excrete on demand until your credit cards and credit lines are maxed out in accordance with the Excess Consumption Design system. You won’t overturn that programming in one or two reading sessions, even if you stay up late drinking double shot espresso coffees.

It’s not excessive for you and your small group permaculture learning community to decide to spend one to three months studying each section before going on to the next one.

That stretches the initial learning process out to perhaps one to three years.

That is not too long of a time to devote to learning how to hack permaculture design for the benefit of your life and the lives of those you love and who care for you.

Enjoy!

Always make time for celebration as your learning progresses.

Together, we can become a supportive learning community that will ride the iPermie wave of permaculture design knowledge.

This is a stress-free place. There are no permaculture police to pounce on you if you make a “mistake.” It is not a college class where your grade will impact your ability to get into graduate school or find a good job. You don’t have to get everything first time you hear it. You can just relax and go with the information flow and let it wash over you and through you and become part of your understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Transformation and Permaculture

Learning permaculture is a transformative experience. It is not just a matter of mastering a set of principles, strategies, and techniques. “If only it could be so simple.”

Transformative learning is learning that enables irreversible, profound, emancipatory change for the better — in our values, world views, beliefs, perspectives, understandings, and frameworks (or ‘meaning schemes’) for imagining, thinking, designing, planning and acting; and in our day-to-day living and relating (to self, others, and the built and natural world). It is the ‘highest’ level of learning.” (Jack Mezirow, Understanding transformation theory, Adult Education Quarterly).

So as you can see, if you thought this permaculture stuff was just another gardening class, you are wrong. It is a plot to change the world by changing lives — one person, one family, one household, at a time. If you don’t want to change the world for the better by transforming your life, stop reading now.