00231 Design Concepts for Permaculture

Self-Regulation

Mollison describes a Principle of Self-Regulation:

The purpose of a functional and self-regulating design is to place elements or components in such a way that each serves the needs, and accepts the products, of other elements.

Think of a forest or a prairie.

No one turns on a sprinkler to water the trees in a forest. No one mows the grass in a prairie. There is no gardener to scatter mulch and plant green manures. These natural ecosystems work by themselves, for themselves, as self-regulating and balancing feedback systems.

“Sustainable” means that a system provides for its own needs and contributes to the needs of others in the context and community in which you live. You are not an island; you are dependent on others, and others are dependent upon you.

In a self-regulating system, there is a just sharing of resources that works over time. We know it works because the forest and the prairie continue in their existence.

In human terms, we speak of distributing surplus or distributive justice.

If you produce a surplus within your lifestyle — more resources than what you need for life — you can make resources available to your community to support the community’s needs which in turn support you in a collection of interdependent relationships.

You cannot make it through life on your own, by yourself. You need a community. Your community would be decreased and not as fruitful without you. The structures for this kind of sharing are contingent upon the context — that is, they will vary based on the unique circumstances of each situation on the ground.

“Sharing resources” refers to any method of moving resources around. It can include paying and receiving wages, making and receiving investments, depositing money in accounts that is then lent in the community, buying shares in a cooperative or enterprise, or making outright donations and gifts to others.

Don’t delude yourself into thinking that this is easy or quick because it isn’t easy and it isn’t quick. How long did it take that forest to get where it is today? It didn’t happen in a week or two. Forests and prairies think in decades and centuries.

When we apply this concept in rural and peri-urban permaculture —

• Instead of importing fertility and water for the garden, you compost organic materials and harvest rainwater. Activities of the local system provide fertility (mulch, compost, cover crops, green manures, animal husbandry, etc.)
• When products of elements on the site supply other elements on the site, and each has its needs supplied by other onsite elements, surplus circulates and cares for people and the planet’s ecologies.

When we apply this concept in an urban or college lifestyle context —

• The various activities of your life, household, and community interact in ways that incorporate many beneficial connections of interdependency.
• The various elements of the lifestyles and actions of members, associations, and structures of your community supply the needs of the community.

For example — maybe you get food from a farmers’ market, CSA, or food coop that accepts contributions from you of your compostable organic materials. You pay for your food with a combination of labor and money.

Thus it comes to pass that surplus circulates through such a system and meets the needs of people and the area’s ecologies. A system like this is sustainable over time.

This is not necessarily a system limited to a local geographical area. In the modern era, systems like this may be large.

The fact that such systems are difficult to reproduce by human intervention with our present knowledge and experience does not change the goal. While for now it is always an error to speak of “sustainable human systems,” we can legitimately work toward a state of being “more sustainable,” or “more self-regulating.”

As we will see, succession is an important aspect of this process.

The Sources of Work and Pollution

When the various activities of your life, household, and community —

• do not interact in ways that incorporate beneficial connections of interdependency,
• so that the different elements of your lifestyle and the members/associations/structures of your community do not supply the various needs of the community,
• you are stuck in a system that generates waste and causes unnecessary work. That costs all concerned time, energy, money, and resources.

In such a system, there won’t be any surplus to distribute. The community depends upon inputs from outside (subsidies) to keep going.

That’s how we create work and pollution.

Pollution equals resources that we aren’t using well.

If we don’t use them well, we waste them. Mollison wrote in the Design Manual —

A POLLUTANT is an output of any system component that is not being used productively by any other component of the system.

EXTRA WORK is the result of an input not automatically provided by another component of the system.

When there aren’t enough resources cycling through the community so that the community is not able to support all of its members, you get unnecessary work and pollution and dependence upon outside resources.

This dependency, work, and waste costs energy of all kinds — human, fossil fuel, alternative, etc.

Permaculture design allows you to avoid pollution and unnecessary work. Our goal is a system that minimizes pollution and work for your life. Permaculture will help you —

• Minimize work and maximize cooperation;
• Minimize consumption and maximize beauty;
• Minimize waste and maximize enjoyment;
• Minimize danger and maximize security;
• Minimize conflict and maximize wisdom.

We aren’t afraid of work. Work is healthy. We don’t want work for the sake of work. We especially don’t want unnecessary work.

Our goal is not a dingy-gray lifestyle of endless drudgery in service of some unobtainable Ideal. Leisure time is good. Most of us need more of it and we work too hard, not by choice, but by necessity. Why is this true?

Because that’s the way we design our systems to work! We —

• maximize work,
• maximize competition,
• maximize danger,
• maximize consumption, and
• maximize waste as a matter of system design.

Our goal is to do better — to learn to design to minimize the problems and maximize the benefits.

Note that throughout these discussions, “community” may be a geographic neighborhood, or it may be a community based on some other structure (an invisible structure like an enterprise, a cooperative, a religion, an eco-village, etc.)

Resources as Energy Storages

How is it that our forests or prairies can do what they do without the support of outside intervention by gardeners and farmers? The answer in part is —

• every element serves more than one function,
• many elements serve every important function, and,
• every element stores energy.

Forests have energy storages:

• A tree is many things. One of them is “energy storage.” Its leaves fall, compost on the floor, and provide nutrients (energy) to other living things. When the tree dies, it falls onto the floor of the forest, many things eat the stored energy of its wood and roots.
• Herbs use deep taproots to bring up nutrients (energy) from the subsoil, store them in leaves and branches, and feed browsing animals as they nibble on their growth.
• The browsing animals (herbivores) are energy storages for the carnivores, and also for worms and other micro flora and micro fauna that feed on decaying carcasses.

Think of the resources of your life and community as forms of energy storage.

In traditional rural and peri-urban permaculture, we identify these kinds of elements as storages —

• water in a pond or barrel,
• compost in a pile,
• food in a pantry,
• hay in a barn.
• Etc.

In the urban context, energy storages include —

• Networks of mutual support and trade with farmers and local artisans that supply the community,
• Home food and water storage,
• Savings and investments
• Community structures that support resilience in the face of community challenge

Of course, these urban storages also work in rural areas, and the rural area examples work in cities too except that there are not many hay barns downtown.

Permaculture designs systems that increase energy storages in a system.

Entropy and Affinity.

Entropy wants to —

• empty the barrel,
• scatter the hay,
• spoil the food,
• disrupt the network,
• destroy community structures.

We harness the energy of entropy with our design work that encourages affinity so that —

• we don’t scatter the hay,
• we don’t spoil the food,
• we only empty the barrel by our intention
• we strengthen the local food and artisan networks,
• we preserve home food and water storage, and
• we strengthen and expand our community structures.

Good design creates storages that meet the needs of people as well as other biological elements in the community, whether that be —

• crops,
• trees,
• animals,
• insects,
• birds
• associations
• networks
• structures

The more diverse the community, the more stable the lifestyle and community become. Permaculture diversity is not simply a matter of the multiplication of individual elements. We want to maximize the beneficial connections between the various elements in a system.

Chaos and Disorder

If we add resources into a system beyond its ability to manage those resources, chaos and disorder result. That’s not good for all concerned. Disorder is the opposite of harmony, and inevitably causes waste.

Entropy constantly drains away the resources you have available. It does this by pouring them down sinks. In permaculture terms, a sink is a place where a resource disappears.

Sometimes a sink is a sink — when you run water in your kitchen sink, it goes down the drain and into your city’s sewer system and it is no longer useful or available to you.

Sometimes a sink is a system — the Pentagon’s budget consumes hundreds of billions of dollars and produces no useful products.

For design, this means:

• Only incorporate resources and energy that can be productively used in that system, and
• Build harmony and cooperation into the workings of the system(s) so that elements use the products of their neighbors and provide useful services/products to their neighbors.

Succession.

First things first. Second things second. If you want to build a house, you start with the foundation, not the roof. If you want a food forest, you don’t plant trees “first thing.” First you improve the fertility of the soil with nitrogen fixing, beneficial insect attracting, and nutrient accumulator plants. After working on this for about a year or so, plant a tree. Succession can be easily observed in nature and if we harness its power in our designs, we will have better results. 00371 discusses this concept in more detail.

Guilds in Permaculture

A gathering of mutually beneficial plants, systems, communities, etc. is referred to in permaculture as a guild. To date most research and work with guilds has been biological. In my garden, I plant a tomato guild consisting of these plants:

tomatoes (multiple varieties), hot peppers (multiple varieties), asparagus, basil, mints.

Guilds however not only work with gardens, they can also work with invisible structures. In fact, the word "guild" derives from medieval organizations in Europe that provided protective safety net services, employment, and work training to their members. Modern unions and fraternal organizations are direct descendants of the medieval guilds.

Summary

Self-regulation. We like it. We want more of it. Getting there is difficult and takes time.

Sources of work and pollution. Bad design is the source of work and pollution. We always try to design to eliminate unnecessary work and pollution.

Resources as energy storages. We like them and we want and need more of them.

Entropy. This is everywhere and we counter it with affinity.

Chaos and disorder. Look for sinks and eliminate or regulate them. Only bring in that which can be actually used. Harmony and cooperation help.

Succession. One thing always leads to another. Since this is a tendency of things in general, use it in your design work to make your life and work easier.

Guilds. We like 'em and need more research to develop best practices for guilds, both biological and cultural/invisible structures.