01011 Invisible Structure Basics

Clarifying the Invisible Structure Concept

Here are some visible structures, and how invisible structures impact them.

Housing — Building and zoning codes, adopted by government councils and enforced by bureaucratic systems, mandate minimum size, materials, lot sizes, and other design elements. Cultural aesthetics and legal code provisions influence the external appearance of the house and the choice of interior amenities. Economics governs the size of the house and the quality of its furnishings. Politics may destroy housing and give use of the property to others.

Food production — Laws and regulations govern the geographic locations of food growing, the sale of food, its processing and preservation. Some foods are illegal to produce and consume. Government may regulate the price of foods. Cultural and personal preferences, often transmitted through families, define taste, thus dictating what we eat and what we don't eat. The concept of “food” has family, cultural, religious, regulatory, and cultural meanings and definitions.

Landscape — City ordinances can dictate the location of trees, forbid certain plants, place limits on plant growth, arbitrarily forbid planting in certain areas, forbid vegetation larger than an arbitrary size, mandate planting of certain varieties. Governments may prevent building rainwater harvesting structures in landscapes. Governments often mandate segregation of neighborhoods by economic class.

In any given area, three big invisible structure issues are:

1. control of the land,
2. control of work,
3. definition and control of the economic system

The economic system —

• Dictates who controls the land,
• Prescribes a system to enforce that control,
• Regulates work and income,
• Regulates how money may be spent.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Invisible structures may produce consequences that are good, bad, or indifferent.

Some of the invisible structures of the 20th century had catastrophic consequences for hundreds of millions of people (World Wars I and II, colonial repression, oil wars, etc.).

Some of the invisible structures of the 20th century had beneficial consequences for many people. The nonviolent invisible structures that made up the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s in the United States overthrew a system of institutionalized racial segregation.

Invisible structures are like icebergs.

When we look at the physical aspects of reality we only see part of what happens. Much of the work of invisible structures goes on at a subconscious level, where people just “assume” that things are the way they are and they do not question those assumptions that they seemingly have had since birth. What we can see and feel and touch is like an iceberg. Maybe we only can see 1/7th of reality. We find the other 6/7ths of reality amidst the invisible structures of our lives.

Like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, those hidden assumptions of modern life drive the unsustainability of our society. As the Titanic sank, many of its crew and passengers worked frantically to fashion expedient life rafts out of materials they could find. In the modern era, there are other invisible structures at work in the present era to both create life rafts and to heal the unsustainability of our systems before it is too late.

Permaculture ethics are the essential common ground starting place for our work with invisible structures. Bill Mollison, cofounder of permaculture, says —

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

This begins with a personal ethical decision to take responsibility for our actions. That commitment requires that we “turn on the lights” and open our eyes and see everything as it is — which includes the impacts and consequences of our actions upon the Earth, our fellow humans, the planetary biosphere, and ourselves as individual persons.

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.

This of course doesn’t stop us from attempting to predict what the consequences of our actions are, at least, it has never stopped me from doing so. It does — or at least, it should — inject enough uncertainty into all such equations regarding the “Big Picture” that we can legitimately maintain an attitude of hope that even as we blunder our way into the future, we may yet figure things out enough to redeem the future dooms coming at us with something much better than what appears to be likely at the present moment.

Just as the three ethics inform our work in our gardens and houses, they are the basis for all that we do with invisible structures.

Permaculture says we need —

Societies where our duties and responsibilities to nature are similar to those of people to people.

We need an ethic of right livelihood. If we work for destruction, we will get destruction. If we shop and spend for destruction, we will get destruction. If we vote for destruction, we will get destruction. We get what we pay for with our work, our money, and our votes. Energy always follows the pattern. If we want something better, the first step is to stop working and shopping and voting for destruction.

We design within a holistic framework and reject chopping every thing into neat boxes that can be separately categorized. As we fragment our realities, we lose understanding of what happens to and around us.

We need conserver societies that reject gluttony and instead invest in a network of modest, small, well managed, and effective systems.

Emotionally, striving after status and glory is a dead end. We enhance the meaning of our lives with action toward common ideals. It is not enough to mean well. The work must get done. Not taking action to save the planet is the moral and practical equivalent of chopping down forests and dropping nuclear bombs on cities.

As we mature toward a society that wastes not, and embraces permaculture ethics, then leisure time becomes a plentiful resource.

No one should have to work as hard as we do now. We have to work so hard and so much because the invisible structures of our society promote waste and create pollution. Surplus doesn’t circulate in ways that benefit the common good because of the many systems that take from the many to give to the political elites and their economic allies.

We need ethical political systems based on cooperation, not competition. It’s never been clear how to get there. That's not an uncommon problem for human beings, however. No one could predict, by looking at an oak seed, what a mature oak tree would look like. We know that if we don’t plant the oak seed, we will never see the tree. The thing to do is to go ahead and plant the seeds, even if we are clueless about the details of the eventual mature expression of a political system for a population informed by and excited about the ethics of permaculture. Each life, well lived in accordance with the ethics of permaculture, is without a doubt the seed of a political system based on cooperation, not competition.

When I began the process that became the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (America’s first cooperative to only sell locally produced food and nonfood items) I said to myself, I want to start something that makes it easier for people to make good food choices.

That is not a bad place to start when we think about the design challenges of invisible structures:

How do we create structures that make it easier for people to make good, better, and best choices?