05071 Water in your lifestyle design

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries — a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man. — Gerald Durrell

Water is essential for life. Without water, in only three days you die. In the United States and other developed countries, pure water is so easily available that we take it for granted. Yet, the handwriting is already on the wall for our casual approach to this most vital resource.

One of the purposes of permaculture design is to help you maintain and increase the quality of your life while lessening the burden that your life is on your ecosystem and its watershed. Your lifestyle design needs a holistic approach to water.

At minimum, your lifestyle design should address these issues.

Stop doing harm to the watershed. Look for all the ways that you voluntarily pollute and damage your watershed and design a path to eliminate or greatly reduce the harm you do to your watershed.

Use less water. Your lifestyle design will consider how you can live your life and use less water. This will be a mixture of behavioral issues and invisible structure work, so that you participate in creating human systems that are water conservative.

Stop others from doing harm to the watershed. This is mostly work with invisible structures. Here your community must address larger scale issues of pollution of its watershed by human activities. Your participation in such work is part of your lifestyle design. It’s not an optional activity. You live in a community and thus you share responsibility with others for the activities of your community. You can’t just sit back, work on your own behavior, and abandon the community to its own devices. Permaculture is, among many things, about leadership to implement human systems that care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future through our mutual awareness of limits and the responsible circulation of surplus resources through the communities.

What beneficial connections link these water issues and the other aspects of your life? How can you increase the beneficial connections among your water issues and the rest of your life? Are there any negative connections? Can you eliminate those?

Resilience, Persistence, Constancy. What is your back-up to your municipal water supply? If it goes down for a shorter or longer time, what should you do? Essential services should be met by multiple methods.

Stacked functions. What other functions can be stacked on your water work?