00261 Permaculture Toolbox

There is no better designer than nature. — Alexander McQueen

A technique is how we do something.

Strategies add time to technique, we use strategies to achieve future goals. It has a value orientation (some things are better than others; we encourage the good and discourage or eliminate the bad).

The list which follows is my own collection and it is not exhaustive of the possibilities. It is not given in any particular order.

Cooperation instead of competition. “Cooperation, not competition, is the basis of existing life systems and of future survival.” (Bill Mollison, Permaculture Design Manual) While we hear a lot about competition, the success of nature Is more about cooperation — giving and receiving and effectively working together for the common good, whether it is a prairie evolving into a forest, or people creating an invisible structure and calling it a “coop.”

Do no harm. No further destruction/manipulation of wilderness areas. Do all you can to stop any harm your lifestyle does to the planetary biosphere. Do not use chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides in growing food or controlling pests. Minimize the pollution your lifestyle creates. Work towards zero waste/emissions.

Use entropy to achieve desired goals. Nothing stays where you put it. Everything eventually falls apart. Each time energy changes there is a net loss of energy. The Laws of Thermodynamics are pitiless and inescapable and universal: You can’t make a profit, you can’t break even, you can’t get out of the game. Since we can’t escape or avoid entropy, we might as well recover something from the process. Rainwater falls onto your roof, runs off down the street and into the storm drain. Or it can fall onto your roof, and be channeled into a rain harvesting system, which provides water for the household and an aquaculture system. The water from the aquaculture system can flow onto your garden areas to provide nutrient rich moisture that your plants need. This is a much better plan than just letting the rain hit your roof and dispersing its energy into the storm drains.

Make the least change for the greatest effect. This implements the conservation principle — “do only what needs to be done.” If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. People often gravitate towards grand solutions that feature much bigness. Nature, on the other hand likes the slow and small. Consider the micro flora and micro fauna that do so much to enrich the soil. You need a microscope to see what’s going on. No bigness or grandiosity there. As you consider what changes you want or need in your life, first think small. We start small or we don’t start at all.

Energy conservation and efficiency. All of modern human social, economic, and technological life “as we know it” is possible because for more than a century we had cheap energy. The physical reality of our world, however, is that fossil fuel energy is neither cheap (when a full accounting is made of its costs) nor will it be endlessly available. In the coming years we will see the rock of the modern lifestyle meet the irresistible force of peak energy, political criminality, climate instability, and economic irrationality. Better get out of the way of that grind while the getting is good. Intelligent energy conservation first begins with household demand destruction and finding non-fossil-fuel powered ways to provide energy needs. It does not start with ordering solar PV panels, although eventually that may be part of a permaculture plan. And when you think about conserving energy, don’t forget “human energy.” There are design situations where you may decide to invest some energy up front — in either materials or fossil fuels — in order to conserve energy all throughout the life history of the element or function receiving the investment. For example . . You might use earth moving machinery to create a pond or buy a set of cast-iron cookware that you can give to your grandchildren.

Prefer biological solutions. As one of the great attempts to fool Mother Nature used to say, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” (That was in a margarine commercial years ago.) In fact, attempts to fool Mother Nature are inevitably doomed to failure. Yet, we build much of our modern technocracy on attempts to do just that. We build the same house, using the same plans, whether we live in Portland, Maine or Los Angeles, California. We think we can use geo-engineering to finesse the crises of global climate change. We always expect that our technology will allow us to triumph over nature — even so, “consider the tornado” and what it can do to a modern city full of high tech gizmos and doodads. Nature and Biology rule us humans too. We are living creatures. To expect us to act as machines is contrary to our nature and not part of our vision of the future.

Everything cycles, so cycle everything. Our grandparents told us — waste not, want not — and they were right. Since everything cycles, we need to get with the program. “Everything” does mean “everything.” Particular attention must be paid to resource use in general, food, water, energy, and material items. Sometimes this suggests changes in a personal lifestyle to avoid items that are hard or impossible to cycle at present. Or we implement a biological solution. Or we stack and rearrange some functions and elements so that we don’t need an item that can’t be recycled or continue an unsustainable practice. As they say . . . Reduce, reuse, remake, recycle, make it over, make do, do without. One plant’s compost is another plant’s fertilizer. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

Design from patterns to details. When we look at nature, we can see patterns repeating, although the details exhibit considerable variation.

Trees have leaves that grow from branches. There are a wide variety of shapes and functions among those leaves.

Spiders weave webs. No two webs will look exactly alike.

Snowflakes have a six-side pattern, with an infinity of variations within.

Patterns provide structure, enable energy flows, and allow life to exist and perpetuate itself. Humans have our own set of patterns, and as the modern world developed, our patterns became less natural, more contrived, and thus required ever more technology and maintenance to operate correctly. We see lots of patterns of waste, which have an infinity of variations in their details. All of this suggests some ideas to us about our human design work. Avoid unnatural patterns and prefer natural patterns. The best situation is where patterns work together, synergistic and interconnected, just as they are in nature. We can repeat patterns, in an almost infinite number of details.

Relative location My mother used to say — “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Permaculture uses “zones” as a way of finding a place for everything. Elements that require frequent maintenance or visits by the household should be placed conveniently. Relative location works for items at your house or apartment and for the geographies of your life. Thus, it’s best to live close to work or school and other frequently visited places in your life’s geographies.

Reciprocity is the giving and receiving within natural and human systems.

Mollison says, “One calorie in, one calorie out.” Dan Hemenway says, “Love is the balance of giving and receiving.” The word on the street has always been — what goes around, must come around. We can utilize the yields of each element of a system to meet the needs of other parts of the design. We design so that as we receive, we give. Surplus money can be deposited in a credit union where it can be lent to local farmers who supply a food coop where I get my groceries.

The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited. Mollison says, “The only limit on the number of uses of a resource is the limit of information and imagination of designer.” The mind-orientation that limits our observations to our present time scale is part of our problem. Going forward, design helps us think in broader, more long term, visions. Over seven generations, what will be the yield of this system? I play a pipe organ built in 1865. It has already outlasted two church buildings and will certainly outlast its present home. One hundred years from now, if properly cared for, it will continue to make music. What was the yield of the original organ design and those who, at the end of the Civil War, which was not a prosperous time, paid for the creation of that musical instrument? Except for the external case and electric fan installed during the 20th century in the wind chest, the interior workings and the design of the organ are original to 1865. That fan could easily be pulled out and the bellows reconstructed, if and when electricity is no longer is available, so its design adapts to its context.

Support biodiversity. Permaculture is not about monocultures, it celebrates the diversity of nature and seeks to enhance, support, and extend the biological diversity of the planet’s biosphere. The longer I garden at my house, the more biologically diverse my little 1/7th of an acre becomes. In the beginning, when I moved to my present house in 1999, I thought, “Well, there’s not really much room here to do a lot of gardening.” Which just goes to show the limits of my own understanding at the time.

Create/use/adapt invisible structures to make it easier to live in accordance with the ethics of permaculture. If a city has an effective public transportation system, fueled by alternative energy, it will be easier to live without a personal car. If your region has a food cooperative that makes it easy for people in cities to buy food directly from farmers, then households can make more permacultural food choices. If the state has regulations that are unfairly applied to small agricultural producers and limits their access to markets, it will be harder for families to make permacultural food choices. One of the iPermie goals is to “create a world where it is easier to be permacultural.” Invisible structures have their limits (as do we all) and they also have their uses.

Grow some food and source other foods from local/regional producers. We need to minimize the amount of land that it takes to support each human person. Small scale agriculture — all the way down to the garden level — is much more productive than broadacre conventional agriculture. The small plots of the Ecology Action folks in Willits, California, can produce the equivalent of 200 bushels of wheat per acre, a productivity that modern conventional agriculture can repeat. As persons learning permaculture design, we design to increase the biological resources of our communities and to create more sustainable local food systems that do little or no harm to the ecosystem and support the human population. Even people who don’t have any land can often raise a few herbs or some greens and tomatoes in containers in a sunny window. I’m not pretending that people without land can raise a substantial amount of food. I think that raising even a small amount of food is useful and satisfying to residents of urban areas. As an additional beneficial connection, a/k/a as a “stacked function,” container plants help keep the indoor air clean and fresh.

Stop subsidizing the destruction of the planet with your time, talents, and money. Don’t buy meat from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Don’t buy plastic. As much as possible withdraw your support from invisible structures that drive destructive and unsustainable functions. Don’t let the rain erode your topsoil and wash away its nutrients. Get your money out of the big banks and into a credit union. Get your money out of the stock market and invest in local sustainable enterprise. Teach and encourage others to do likewise.

Support/start/join/patronize cooperative business enterprises. A corporation, by law, has only one value — maximize the return to the stockholders. The domination of our economy by for-profit corporations is one of the primary “invisible structure” problems we face. On the other hand, a cooperative, by law, orients toward meeting the defined needs of its membership. A credit union is a tactic to apply the strategy of “using invisible structures to make it easier to be permacultural” to money and finance. A food cooperative is a tactic to apply that same strategy to food distribution. A worker-owned cooperative is a tactic to give workers security in employment and a fair and just return on their labor.

Hold water and fertility as high on the property as possible. Gravity is all around us, so you might as well use it. If you catch water at higher elevations (your roof for example) and use it at lower elevations (your garden), the water flows there without pumping. You may not have a choice, as your land may be flat as a pancake. If you do have a choice, catch your fertility and water as high on your land as is practical and thus conserve the amount of energy required to move it around. The applicability of this to people without land is that while urban residents may not have any land personally, they have influence over how their municipality uses the land it has. Some broader-scale permaculture techniques like sculpting land to harvest rainwater can be applied to public properties in urban area, if the citizens organize to push for this. Private businesses can be encouraged to do similar activities with the lands for which they are responsible.

Start small and design systems that are manageable and produce good yields. The biggest mistake most people make in changing their lives is to attempt too much, too soon. This is actually a response to powerlessness. We are so conditioned to helplessness that when we do try to break out of the standard system, we may set ourselves up to fail by attempting grandiose projects that no one could implement in a reasonable time frame with available resources. Thus we reinforce the false idea that we are helpless in the face of our circumstances and can’t change anything.

In permaculture design, it is important to keep our abilities and resources in mind when we do design and be realistic with what we can and can’t do. There’s no point to an elaborate design if it isn’t possible for the person to implement it because it is way beyond their abilities and resources. Small systems are more conservative of resources and productive in their yields. We start small or we don’t start at all.

The Keyline system While most urban residential properties would not be large enough to use its methods, the Keyline system could be applied in parks and other large areas of public responsibility. Governments own a lot of land and how they manage it impacts the local ecosystem. The keyline is where the “ridge meets the valley,” and the Keyline system, first described and published by P.A. Yeomans in the 1950s in Australia, is a method of water harvesting/conservation and land regeneration that resulted from the observation of the ridges and valleys on a property and working with them, rather than against them, to achieve the goals of the farmer or the rancher with more property to work with than most urban residents.

Forest Gardens/perennial food production A “food forest” offers seven layers of potential food production:

Mature canopy trees (pecans, chestnuts, oaks, standard varieties of fruit trees),
Understory trees (redbuds, dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit and nut trees),
Woody shrubs and cane fruits (bush cherries, Siberian pea shrub, blackberries and etc.)
Herbaceous plants (asparagus, bee balm, comfrey, dill, rosemary, sage, flowers, this list is long).
Ground covers — (sage, clovers, etc.)
Roots — (day lilies, Jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, etc.)
Climbing vines (grapes, passion fruit, kiwi fruit, etc.)

With the cooperation of the building ownership, and there being some available geography for it, you could plant a food forest at your high rise apartment building. Your city could transform its parks into food forests. Streets could be lined with food forests. The grounds of churches and schools could grow food forests. These are communitarian approaches that can develop a diverse local food system.

Create buildings and structures that incorporate permaculture principles, strategies and tactics regarding energy, food production, waste management/cycling, and water as you work your way towards larger designs. Start small, get bigger with time and experience. Modern buildings generally use energy inefficiently and thus take more resources to operate than is actually necessary. Better design for urban building retrofits is critical to growing more sustainable cities. In becoming more sustainable, it is better to renovate an existing building than to build something entirely new. Use as many recycled and locally sourced materials as possible in renovation or new construction. Meet needs for heating and cooling using passive techniques. Use design and capital investment to minimize operating costs and resources and to maximize on site cycling of resources. Ensure that whatever leaves the property is free of pollution.

The larger the building, the more opportunities it presents for developing more efficient methods of operating the premises.

Create and support invisible structures that promote distributive and social justice. No one should be left behind for the wolves to devour during the cold winter or the hot summer. Creating and supporting structures that help the poor by empowering them to transcend their challenges and circumstances are important aspects of designing our way into a better future.

Take care of yourself and those you love. In the modern world, the human person is expendable. People are just replaceable cogs in the world machine. Persons who get interested in permaculture are often busy people and deeply involved with their communities. It is easy to let the vital and necessary “works of justice and peace and sustainability” become as consuming as a life dedicated to the corporation machine. Always reserve time and space for yourself and your household, your family, your tribe or clan, your friends — those who know you and you know them and there is a relationship of mutual caring and support. Healing and spiritual practices can be important parts of this, as are proper rest, nutrition, exercise, and general attention to wellness and quality of life. In other words, nurture blessings in your life and in the lives of others.

Demonstrate real and practical solidarity with those “far away.” Care for people means, literally, “care for all people,” not just those who look like you, live in your neighborhood, and share bonds of culture and tradition. Care for people includes caring for people who are “not you” — not your culture, not your nation, not your religion, not your race, not sharing any of your traditions. Care for people is care for people, it is not getting a cheap psychological rush about thinking about caring for people. “Be a good neighbor” applies in your physical neighborhood and to our world neighborhood.