00171 Maps and Your Life Inventory

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Think of maps as “pictures” that illustrate your Life Inventory. While you can probably find maps for your community, you will need to make your own maps for your particular living situation(s).

When I began formal permaculture studies with the Barking Frogs Permaculture online Permaculture Design Course, the requirement to draw a base map of my entire property, showing everything therein, and a separate map for the house, intimidated me. This chapter is the result of that learning experience and my subsequent experience in helping other permaculture students learn the importance of maps when it comes to design.

The map is not the territory.

The map is a description of a territory based on the work of a particular observer. Maps have limits in what they can show, although those limitations do not prevent us from making use of them for what they can do for us. In permaculture, we never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

A map is a form of writing that describes a landscape or interior of a building using a combination of words, drawings, and symbols.

The language of maps conveys meanings. That’s one of the functions stacked on this assignment. By drawing a map of where you go in your daily life, you will learn details of your geographies that perhaps were not evident before. To describe them in map language, you have to visualize them in their context and discern a way to record that on paper.

Everyone in the household should work on the map, depending of course on their ages.

These maps are for your personal use. They are not for submission to someone who will grade on form and neatness. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, to make a report that is useful for your purposes.

One of the important functions stacked on the process of mapmaking is that as you draw maps, you will learn a LOT about the important places in your life.

The mechanics of map making.

If you are already familiar with some kind of online sketch or drawing program, you can use that. For the rest of us, adding the complication of a computer-based drawing system is not necessary for permaculture design.

My first time around, I wasted a lot of time trying to find and learn a computer drawing program. I looked for a complicated tool, when I had access to more simple and fully adequate, tools such as a ruler, craft knife, colored pencils, and graph paper:

That’s a lesson on appropriate scale, an important permaculture principle about which considerably much more will be said later.

I said to myself, "I can't draw." As it turned out, I could do basic drawing, once I actually got past the jitters and started doing the work.

So in case anyone else is worries about their alleged inability to draw a map — while I am not a serious map-maker or graphics artist nor do I play those roles on television — here are my thoughts on "How to draw a map if the last time you drew something serious was in sixth grade art class.”

Basic Map Techniques

I used graph paper and tracing templates that I either bought at a local office supply store or ordered off the internet. Below are some URLs for sites where I ordered templates.

Most of my maps were 8-1/2 x 11, because I had to publish those maps in a design document and submit it for certification. Since this project is for your personal benefit, I suggest you make a larger size map, like 11" x 17". If you can’t find graph papers that size, simply tape together two 8-1/2" x 11" sheets.

Larger maps are easier to work with than smaller maps.

Draw the map with a pencil, and keep your eraser handy. Use colored pencils to indicate various elements — blue for water features, green for trees and shrubs, brown for a fence, etc. Use the stencils to draw in items like fences, trees, bushes or furniture and kitchen appliances.

Materials of map-making.

  • Colored pencils (the same pencils that school kids use for grade school art class)
  • a ruler,
  • erasers,
  • correction fluid,
  • number 2 pencils
  • pencil sharpener.
  • Small T-square
  • Craft knife
  • scissors
  • glue (make your own from water and flour!)
  • Graph paper
  • Stencils and templates
  • A box to keep everything together

Draw to Scale.

“Draw to scale” means that you assign a smaller dimension on the map to represent a larger measurement of the territory depicted by the map. The graph paper I used was four lines to the inch, each little box was a quarter of an inch. That 1/4 inch is the fundamental unit for all of the maps I drew for my design. To “draw to scale,” you decide how many feet or inches or yards or miles (or whatever measurement you use) that each 1/4 inch box will represent on your map.

My base map of my house on my personal 1/7th acre urban property is a "1/4 inch = 4 feet" scale. Therefore, each inch on the graph paper equals 16 feet on my property. Some of my maps were "1/4 inch = 2 feet" scale. These were for smaller portions of the site. Some small nooks were "1/4 inch = 1 foot" scale.

Stencils and Templates

You can find stencils or templates for outdoor and indoor design elements, like trees, bushes, furniture, appliances, etc. These stencils have different sizes for these items based on various scales. Landscape templates have outlines for common outdoor elements. Architectural templates have outlines for the elements of a house — kitchen, bathrooms, furnishings for living areas and bedrooms, etc. These stencils and templates are often available at office supply stores and are readily available on the internet.

Alternatively, you can make your own sketches. You can develop your own map symbols. Whatever you do with symbols should be explained in a chart located on or near the map. We sometimes refer to this as a map key since it unlocks the meaning of the map. List each symbol placed on the chart on the key and explain it. Don’t count on your memory three months in the future to remember the meaning of the symbols.

Use pencils, instead of ink, in case you need to erase a mistake or you change you mind about where you want something.

Labels for the map.

You can simply write in the names of elements on the map or you can make labels with a computer printer. Use a craft knife to cut them out and glue to paste them on the map. I've recently thought that I should have made my own glue, which would have been simple enough to do, rather than buy and use a commercial packaged in plastic product like glue stick.

I drew red lines from the labels to the features in situations where an area was crowded with several elements.

If you print really well, you can simply write labels on the map itself. You want the map to be legible and understandable to anyone looking at it. You may want to change something. It may be easier to remove or overlay a label than to erase markings on the map itself.

I colored in the symbols for bushes and trees with green. Anything water related is blue (such as symbols showing the locations of cisterns, or flows of water). Fences are brown lines, thicker than a single line (there are templates to make lines thicker than single-wide).

Household Base Map

The first map you need is a Household Base Map. This is a detailed map of your house or apartment. If you live in a house on a plot of land, you need both a map of the house and a map of the plot of land on which the house sits.

Your Household Base Map should show every element of your immediate household As your design progresses, you may want to make additional maps or sketches to show the locations of new elements or elements you decide to move from one place to another. At the end, you can draw a new map, incorporating all of the recommended changes.

You can use map overlays. Use clear material (such as may be used for overhead transparencies). Tape one end to the top of your base map. Lay it over your map and make additional drawings. This could be part of your design process, allowing you to test different ideas for locations for elements in your design.

If your apartment includes any outdoor areas, show them in your map. For example, your apartment or town home may have a door that opens to the outside, with some sidewalk, porch, and a bit of yard included in “your” territory. Describe that area on your map.

Community Base Map.

The second map you need is a Community Base Map. This shows all the important geographic places in your life at the community level. It doesn’t include your parents or friends who might live in another state. This is your ordinary living immediate geography community. The important sites to note on this map include:

  • Your house or apartment, condo, town home
  • Job or other work place
  • Recreation
  • Shopping (food, clothing, thrift stores, flea markets, whatever)
  • Medical care
  • Libraries
  • Community amenities that you use (your church if you have one, library, etc.)
  • Your school (if a student)
  • Entertainment and recreation
  • Friends and family in the area
  • Whatever else that is important for your regular routines

Map places you actually use. Don’t put the library on your personal community map if you never go to a library. If there is a bar you go to every week, mark it on the map.

You should be able to find a map already made for your community to use for this purpose, such as a road map. Check Google Maps online. This map will probably cover a large territory, since most of us our lifestyle geographies are “all over the place.” As you progress in your design work, the area of your personal involvements will possibly shrink a bit as you work on the geographies of your life.

One useful way to display maps is to put pin or tape them onto a rigid surface that is soft enough to accept pins stuck into it. Sheets of cardboard work well for this purpose. Use map pins to mark your destinations and colored ribbons to identify common routes of travel.

Life Base Map

If there are significant aspects and people of your life outside of your immediate geographic area, make a third map which includes everything outside of your immediate geographic area. This could be the locations of your —

  • parents,
  • siblings,
  • close friends
  • co-workers,
  • places you visit frequently
  • other work locations you visit
  • other educational locations you visit
  • thing else important to you, outside of your immediate geographic area

This should be a printed map, large enough for the purpose. If your life is within one country, you can use a national road map. If you are a world person, you will need a world map, or maybe a globe would be a better choice.

Developing the Information for the Maps

I live in a house on a 1/7th acre plot of land in the city. With the help of friends, I made a series of freehand sketches of my whole property and its various sections. We used a measuring tape (thus the need for a 2nd person) and sited the various elements of my yards and house based on measurements from the sidewalks and other prominent features on the property. We measured each item from at least two fixed landmarks on the property.

If you have access to a measuring wheel (a/k/a a surveyor’s wheel), it will help you measure distances. I didn’t have one, so I made a traditional measuring tool known as a “Jacob’s Staff.” Get some non-stretch rope, a length convenient to use and which fits the scale of the area you need to measure. If your growing area is about 50' long, don’t make a 200' long Jacob’s Staff. If your growing area is about 15 meters long, don’t make a 100 meter Jacob’s Staff. Mark the rope clearly at a convenient measuring unit — usually a foot for outdoor measurements, here in the United States, in metric measures for those elsewhere. Use a marker with an ink that won’t run if it gets wet.

Attach the “far end” (the highest measurement) of the rope to a stick or staff, and wrap the rope around the stick. Have someone hold it at the anchor point, and walk down the side and when you get to the end, you know the distance measurement. A Jacob’s Staff is particularly useful for measuring non-straight lines (curves etc.) and over rough terrain.

Diagrams

From time to time you may find it useful to make a diagram of some aspect of your observation, evaluation, or design work. For example, you could make a diagram showing your sources of food, or that describes your personal transportation or energy system. If you are a visual person, these will be helpful. You could make a series of diagrams for a particular purpose. You could diagram the present status of your food system, the future goal of your personal food system, and some of the intermediate/transition steps.

What you will learn from maps and diagrams.

Maps document the particular places of your lifestyle design, written in the language of maps. They show you where you are right now with your geographies. These are the places from which your journey begins. You have to know where you are at the beginning, in order to find routes for your journeys.

During your permaculture journeys, you will make decisions that impact the reality of your life.

If you don't know the actual reality of your life, you may make irrational decisions, or choose things that are counterproductive, or which cause major negative problems, the list of which could be long, annoying, and expensive to fix.

Measure twice, cut once, my grandfathers used to say. When I would help them, they would often say "Did you measure that twice, Bobby Max?" They knew that I am notoriously likely to just rush into something without measuring properly or with measuring with an eye of achieving a certain result. They told me over and over, "Measure twice, cut once." Measure your life twice, here at the beginning, and avoid regrets later.

Later you will rewrite the language of that map, in your first attempt to describe your permaculture design that will be implemented in reality.

Good information leads to good decisions.

Bad information leads to bad decisions.

So be in touch with all of the realities of your places of design — this is your life!

Document it!

Online resources for drafting materials/templates:

http://www.timelytemplates.com/ | http://www.draftingsteals.com/