00211 Permaculture Ethics

What is permaculture?

The Permaculture Design Manual takes 574 pages to answer it. iPermie has 380,000+ words on the subject and its ancillary topics. Here is the short definition by Bill Mollison, who together with David Holmgren developed the discipline of permaculture:

Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. — Permaculture Design Manual

He follows this definition with the Prime Directive of Permaculture.

“The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now.” — Permaculture Design Manual

Sometimes I think it is easier to describe what permaculture does, thus my definition at the beginning of iPermie —

Permaculture helps you design your life so you can experience more beauty, health, happiness, freedom, security, and cooperation, with less work, consumption, injustice, conflict, stress, danger, and waste.

We could approach this by looking at what permaculture involves, the approach I used in 00021 “Hacking Permaculture in 350 words”.

As we see here at the beginning, permaculture is not gardening class. I belabor this point, here and elsewhere, because to many people, permaculture has somehow become synonymous with perennial agriculture — planting fruit and nut trees, cane fruit, perennial herbs, etc.

Permaculture is a design system. It is not perennial agriculture. It is not gardening. It is not passive solar. All of these are good ideas and depending on the situation, they may be parts of a permaculture design. These good ideas are not permaculture. Permaculture is design, pure and simple, used to achieve goals in our lives. Good ideas are good ideas. Reskilling class is reskilling class. Best practices are best practices. All are important and all are what they are. Permaculture is what it is — a design system that promotes sustainability and transformative change inspired by the ethics of permaculture. It’s not helpful if we try to make permaculture something other than what it is.

Permaculture is founded upon your willingness to take personal responsibility for our actions.

My personal definition:

Permaculture designs more sustainable human lifestyles and systems that care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future by accepting and designing limits on our personal and communal behaviors and allowing surplus to circulate for the benefit of all.

Getting into permaculture design is like giving sight to the blind. We may think we have a good handle on “all that is,” at least as it impacts us and those we love. Yet, in a moment, that illusion can be swept away and we may find ourselves in what appears to be a completely different situation. I think that all permaculture education materials should include a disclaimer . . . “WARNING: The study of permaculture design may be hazardous to your complacency, indifference, and lack of personal responsibility.”

People tell a story of three persons who examined an elephant in the dark and then attempted to describe what the animal looked like.

The man who touched the tail said the elephant was like a snake. The one who felt the tusk said it was like a plow. The third who felt the ear said it was like a fan.

When they turned the lights on, the examiners learned the truth, and are undoubtedly surprised by how big and comprehensive that truth was. Consider how different the real reality was from what they had previously thought to be “real.”

The question of the hour is — how shall we live on this planet, with our fellow human beings and all the other creatures of Earth?

The answer begins with a personal ethical decision to take responsibility for our actions.

In other words, we turn on the lights and open our eyes and see everything as it is. That includes the impacts and consequences of our actions upon the Earth, our fellow humans, the planetary biosphere, the Earth’s creatures, and ourselves as individual persons.

There are any number of voices out there these days which marginalize the importance of personal effort. They cite Jevon’s Paradox (the claim that increased efficiency in the use of a resource will inevitably increase the utilization of the resource) to discourage energy conservation. People say that personal efforts and lifestyle changes have minimal impact compared to large industrial uses.

The response of permaculture is — so what?

We got into the present situation as myriads of people made bad decisions over long periods of time. It would be nice to find a shortcut to get us out of the present situation quickly, a magic permacultural wand that could be waved and make all things better. Thus far nothing appears to fit that bill. We are left with the thought that we will get out of our problems the way we got into them — myriads of people making good, better, and best decisions over long periods of time.

So never let anyone tell you that what you do doesn’t matter, because it does.

What you do matters to you, to those who care for you, to your community, and to the planet and all of its associated ecologies and watersheds and bioregions.

The legitimacy of hope

We humans often overestimate our ability to peer into the future and determine the outcomes of our actions (for good and for ill). There are limits and boundaries to what we can discern from the present situation. Indeed, there are limits and boundaries to what we can know about any situation. Reality is that complex. Perhaps I should say, our shared realities are that complex.

This of course doesn’t stop us from attempting to predict the consequences of our actions, at least, it has never stopped me from doing so.

But this knowledge dilemma does inject enough uncertainty into all the current predictions of doom that we can legitimately maintain an attitude of hope even as we blunder our way into the future. We may yet figure things out enough to deflect a fate of horror and replace it with a future of hope.

Complex systems are, well, complex. Making small tweaks here and there can have unpredictable consequences. Results may be way out of proportion to the tweak. The results can be bad or they can be good. So we roll the dice.

The limits of governmental action

A better future comes from the willingness of people to take personal responsibility for their actions. If we think we can trust the government to do the right thing, in the present cultural and political environment, well, that’s a waaaay skitzy thought. Moreover, there are certain dangers to relying on government as the source of our salvation from the consequences of our own actions, at the present moment.

Government actions, which compel large numbers of people to act in certain ways, have major impacts. If the compelled action is benign, the consequences are good. If not, then not, and on a big and dangerous scale. Government mistakes wreck entire civilizations, and have done so frequently in human history.

I am in favor of the government doing good and I oppose the government doing evil. The tricky thing is to discern between the two, as one person's “good” may be another person's “bad.” Perhaps a better way to formulate this is to say that government should protect and enhance the common good of people, the planet, and the future. Government action becomes most productive when it is in the context of mass action by families and households who change the way they live so that they also protect the common good of people, the planet, and the future, can do little to solve our problems.

This process starts with our own personal lives or we don’t start at all.

When the government begins to do the right thing, it will only be because millions and millions of people have started to do the right thing in their own households.

If tens and hundreds of millions of people remain mired in lifestyles of acquisition and consumption, it is folly to think that the government would ever legislate anything other than more acquisition and more consumption.

It didn’t happen at Easter Island, nor with the Chacoans, Mayans, or Romans. It didn’t happen in 1789, or 1917 and it won’t happen with us either.

It’s broad scale individual/household action that leads to a grassroots political and economic revolution or it is environmental catastrophe and die-off. Those are the only choices.

As we come to the tipping point where hundreds of millions of people worldwide begin to do the right thing for the ecology, it will become possible for the governments of this planet to do the right thing, in a serious way, for the planet. This will put a capstone on an arch of hope for the future.

In the meantime, it’s best to have minimal expectations of what the government can do. We should always fight against egregious violations of ecology and justice, work to restrain the rapaciousness of corporate actors, and make as many tweaks to the rules as we can to make it easier for people to do the right thing. This kind of work though should never distract us from the real work for the future, which goes on at the grassroots.

As we go lower on the governance ladder, more diverse possibilities open up. It is easier to get right action out of a local municipal government than it is out of a national government. More about this will be said at much greater length in section 1, Invisible Structures.

Lessons of the Civil Rights movement

Why was the Civil Rights movement successful in ending legally mandated racial segregation and discrimination? Because millions of people came to understand that racial injustice was a social evil that could no longer be tolerated as a juridical reality in our society. It wasn’t everyone, and many people opposed the movement, but it was “enough.” It became a critical mass. The targets of the oppression — African Americans — withdrew their consent and refused to participate in their own oppression. So it came to pass that as people’s attitudes and actions changed, so did the laws, and we are better today because of this.

While racial problems remain, the willingness of people 50 years ago to leave aside what they had been taught about the “proper relationships of the races,” led by courageous people who refused their consent to the system, created space for governmental action that ended that particular structure of social oppression and opened doors of justice and opportunity for millions of people.

This level of understanding and acceptance of responsibility is what the present moment calls us to. We can therefore reasonably ask ourselves, “Now what do we do?”

When we answer that question, another immediately presents — “What’s next?”

And so on and so forth, until you have completed the first draft of your permaculture design.

That is what permaculture design is for — to help us decide what we should do with our lives of responsibility and awareness.

We proceed from the general to the particular, and we begin with ethics.

Ethics of permaculture.

There are three ethics of permaculture:

• Care for the Earth
• Care for People
• Care for the Future through designing and accepting voluntary limits on personal and communal behavior, and ensuring that surplus circulates and does not concentrate or centralize.

This is the fundamental ethical pattern of permaculture.

It replaces other patterns of greed, violence, and gluttony that drive us towards ecological catastrophe.

Secular and universal.

These are secular ethics. They are not tied to any particular religion or moral system or philosophy. They transcend all such human boundaries and categories. This isn’t to say that our individual religious and moral beliefs are not important, because they obviously are to many of us. It is to say that we can come together, in our diversity, at a common “table of ethical fellowship,” in the face of our shared destiny as human beings.

Permaculture ethics are the basic minimum of personal behavior that transcends human differences of culture, politics, philosophies, and religions. They can govern our interrelationships as individuals, families or households, races, religions, nations, peoples. Permaculture ethics are an aspect of natural law.

All people — be they Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Animist, or Atheist, and all points in between — can care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future.

All people — whatever their politics — can care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future.

All people, be they European or Asian, African or Polynesian, and all points in between — can care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future.

This doesn’t mean that Buddhism isn’t important to Buddhists, or Catholicism isn’t important to Catholics. It means that we can agree in our common humanity to care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future.

Care of the Earth

The Earth is our home. It’s the only one we have. We cannot exist apart from the natural systems of the planet and its biosphere. We’ve tried — the Biosphere experiment in Arizona was hopefully to be the first step toward designing human habits that could operate independently of their surroundings, without re-supply. Presumably, this was to be applied in the context of space travel and colonies on the Moon or other planets like Mars.

However, the project failed and ended early. While this isn’t definitive proof of the impossibility of the hypothesis, it was a valiant try (in scientific and human terms) that incorporated a lot of research and design effort and resources. We learned that the Earth’s biosphere is more complex than we previously thought and recreating it in a closed environment is not easy.

Long-term thinking about consequences of our actions to the planet and its ecologies is essential to permaculture design.

We often read of the “Seven Generations” principle followed by Native Americans, where they evaluated decisions based on their impact as far as seven generations into the future.

That kind of thinking is utterly foreign to the modern just-in-time mind set.

The permaculture ethic of Care of the Earth starts us on a journey that leads in the direction of understanding that the impact of our actions propagates far beyond our households and even our life spans. I say “starts . . . leads . . . direction . . . understanding . . . “ because this isn’t something that happens overnight.

It is a seed of a tree that starts small and grows large and magnificent with time and nurture.

Care of People

Based on the first ethic, we can say that permaculture is earth-centric. Permaculture is also human-centric, in that we use it to make design decisions that govern our lives and that mitigate the impact of our lifestyles of the proud and powerful upon our planetary neighbors.

We are beings who are consciously aware of our existence and are capable of making decisions that have enormous impacts — for good or for ill — upon everything that is around us. We can remember our history and we can learn lessons from it. “Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.” While people honor this more in rhetoric than in reality, the ability to formulate the concept suggests there remains hope.

If there is anything evident from human history, it is that if we want to care for the planet, we must work for human justice and peace. Throughout our history, economic irrationality, oppression, coercion, and war have driven grave harm to our planet’s biosphere.

The words of this song — “Renunciation” — from the “Little Red Songbook” of the Industrial Workers of the World, illustrate this better than I can, I think. Sing them to the tune “Auld Lang Syne”; the lyrics are by Joachim Raucher:

The sad and tragic fact of modern life is that our lifestyles are possible because our governments use violence to assure access to the cheap resources and cheap labor that makes our nations prosperous. While some may deny this reality, that does not change the actual modern realities of our economic and military systems. A is A, it is not B nor is it C. Imperial despotism is imperial despotism, even if we dress it up with flowery language. All the lipstick in the world will not improve that pig nor change its essential nature.

Write this design decision into your plan —

I will stop killing poor people in poor countries with my lifestyle.

That is the beginning of learning to care for people.

Care for the Future

In many permaculture teaching lineages, the wording of the third ethic abandons the formulation “Care of” and speaks instead of sharing surplus and accepting limits. I do not disagree that the third ethic is about surplus and limits. I agree with others in the movement who formulate the third ethic positively as “Care for the Future,” with an explanation that this requires understanding that there are limits and surplus should circulate for the benefit of the community.

The question is not whether the present lifestyle of peoples in the developed world will be limited or not. “Non-limitation” is not an option. Either we will voluntarily limit our consumption or our consumption will be constrained by our future circumstances. A much better plan is to conserve and curb your consumption in advance of the constraint of our circumstances.

I think that in permaculture there is an aspect of “Caring for the Past.”

We have to look backwards as much as we look forwards, in part to conserve the good things our ancestors bequeathed to us, and to understand the mistakes and problems our ancestors gave to us. Those who do not learn the mistakes of history will repeat them.

Distributive Justice.

Distributive justice is an integral aspect of the third ethic of permaculture. If we want a sustainable society, there must be justice in the distribution of the goods of the earth. If a permaculturist looks at a given community or nation or civilization, and sees people deprived of a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, while others live indulgent, privileged lives, while natural systems that support the people are in decline, we see design problems resulting in social, ecological, and environmental injustice. Some people have too much. Others have too little. Not enough surplus circulates to care for people and care for the planet. Here in a nutshell, is our problem:

World Distribution of Income

Richest 20% controls 82.7% of world income.

Second 20% controls 11.7% of world income.

Third 20% controls 2.3% of world income.

Fourth 20% controls 1.9% of world income.

Fifth 20th% controls 1.4% of world income.

So its 82.7% for 20%, and 17.3% for 80%. Even worse, 60% of the world's population only receives 5.6% of world income.

It is politically fashionable to blame the poor for their own situation. And of course, in any particular situation there can be a complex series of factors and issues that combine to drive poverty. Those who advance the “poor people are personally irresponsible and bring their problems on themselves” propaganda don’t see all the realities of our modern systems.

We in the United States are part of the top 20%. We work hard and we work smart. We use our economic and military power to ensure that a steady stream of resources from throughout the world flows into our economic systems, thereby provisioning our gluttony and consumption.

Because we (and our allies in the other developed countries)take so much, and use our military and economic power to suppress the economic opportunities of others, 80% of the world's population only receive 17.3% of the world's income.

One example of this process at work was the recent energy crisis, which drove food riots in poor countries. Food costs rose due to the increased price of energy and the diversion of food grains to biofuel enterprises. People elsewhere went hungry so that we in the United States could shave a few cents off the price of a gallon of gasoline by burning corn for fuel instead of making it available as food.

Note that this isn’t a claim that any particular system “should” be politically enacted to redress this situation. Instead, it is an observation that systems that breed poverty and centralize wealth are defective at the systemic level. Better design will produce better results.

Lest there be any confusion: the system of politics and economics throughout the world, including the United States, is defective at the systemic level because it does not care for people, it does not care for the planet, nor does it have a care for the future. The income distribution chart in this chapter is only the beginning of those sorrows.

A second clarification is that “circulation of surplus” can happen by different methods. It can be shared via gift or grant, by investment, by starting an enterprise and hiring workers, by making deposits in a credit union that makes loans in the local economy, by buying shares of stock, etc. The methods don’t really matter as long as surplus circulates in the community and does not concentrate.

Some may say, "Well, the rich invest their money, so isn't that the circulating of surplus?" The short answer is "No." Because of systemic design defects, wealth is centralizing. This is unnatural and contrary to the common good. Wealth concentrates at the top in the present system because that is how we designed our system to work.

The problem of greed

Caring for the future with limits on personal and communal behaviors and distributive justice suggests that human beings should not grab all the available resources for ourselves. We are not the only creatures on the planet, and there should be room for all of Creation. If the existential purpose of human beings is to turn the planet into a giant landfill, poison the waters and atmosphere, and kill off all other living creatures, we should get a better existential purpose, quickly. If we think we can get by without our fellow creatures of the air, land, water, and soil, we are delusional.

All economic activity has its roots in nature. A surplus of agricultural production makes the division of labor possible. Without agricultural production, no economic activity is possible. Our systemic economic problems worldwide derive from our exploitation and degradation of nature.

If we change our thinking so that there is room for all, this must inevitably have an impact on our actions, the way we live. Informing the ethics of permaculture is the “Life Ethic” which teaches us that all creatures are not just means to our ends. They are ends in and of themselves. While they have instrumental value to each other and to human beings, they also have intrinsic worth.

The choice to be made.

We aren’t born with our ethics. We don’t always give a lot of thought to how we get our ethics. With permaculture design, we have an opportunity to make ethical decisions that will echo down the corridors of our personal time lines as living beings and well into the future of our descendants.

It is a choice of life or death.

Permaculture design gives us tools, informed by ethical concepts, to direct our actions. As we become willing to accept our ethical responsibilities, we voluntarily choose to care for the earth, care for people, and care for the future through acceptance of boundaries and limits in our lives so that there can be justice in the distribution of surplus. Thus it comes to pass that our lives fill with beauty, enjoyment, wisdom, security, and cooperation — while work, consumption, conflict, danger, and waste dwindle.