08081 Design for Abundance and Economy

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men. — Lao Tzu

One of the first steps of breaking free of the subjugation of the economy of scarcity, the default economic design of this era, is to develop frugality with your money. Frugalities practice temperance in the acquisition and use of material goods. We creatively use things we already own or can access so that we avoid spending money for more stuff and services. It is a strategy that lays the foundation for the growth of an economy of abundance. In large part, it is a matter of understanding the differences between necessities, wants, and greeds, and managing how and what you provide for yourself and your household. So when we design for economy, we also design for abundance. Economy is not a response to scarcity. It is the foundation of abundance.

In permaculture, we get what we design. Keep this in mind when it comes to your economic thinking.

A virtue is a “habit of doing good.”

The purpose of permaculture design is to design and implement patterns so that it is easier for you to do good — systems and structures that help you to care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future.

When it comes to stacking functions, designing for economy is a function stacked on many elements in your permaculture design for your life.

Bob tells the pickle jar story. Again. And not for the last time either. One time in days of yore I was at my grandparent’s house, and as we washed dishes after lunch, I picked up an empty pickle jar, emptied the juice, and dropped it in the trash can. My grandfather reached down into the trash, pulled out the jar, wiped it with a rag, and said to me, “Bobby Max, we already paid for that jar. Why would you want to throw it away?”

And so it came to pass that I learned about recycling years before the concept came into common circulation.

My grandfather’s attitude is, of course, utterly foreign to the way many people do things today. It sure made an impression on me at the time, so much so that fifty years later, I remember it.

Why should anyone care about an empty cheap pickle jar?

Note my grandfather’s action in carefully wiping the jar, as though it were a fine vase. It had no more apparent utility for the family, or so I thought in my juvenile understanding of such things.

The answer was “No, Bobby Max, your answer is not correct.” The wisdom of my grandfather, born on a farm in rural Oklahoma early in the 20th century, taught that the jar, which once held pickles, could hold other things. Buttons, nails, ribbons, pins, flour — there is a long list of tasks this jar could serve for the household. My grandfather was a young married father at the beginning of the Depression. He knew the meaning of poverty from the bitter experience of those days.

While he wouldn’t consciously have thought in this way — the manufacture of that jar embodied energy and resources. Now empty, it can easily be repurposed to hold something else. Today, my kitchen shelves are loaded with former pickle jars. They hold pasta, rice, dried hot peppers, and other miscellaneous dried ingredients for cooking. In the utility room, there are more “used” jars, holding nuts and bolts and the other small accouterments that accumulate in utility rooms.

The “throw-away” mentality that is so popular these daze is one of the fundamental issues of our unsustainable culture. We can't design our way into the future without a rebirth in frugality. If we don't get with the frugality program, we will pay a bitter price for our failure to understand and adapt to the needs of these times.

When it comes to designing for abundance and economy —

  • Resources
  • Money
  • Energy (fossil fuels and alternative)
  • Human energy and effort

are critical to our success, because we need to —

  • Use less resources!
  • Use less money!
  • Use less energy!
  • Use less human effort!

so there is more abundance for all.

The most desirable economic patterns are those that —

  • stack functions,
  • provide redundancy,
  • offer many beneficial connections,
  • use natural methods, featuring the biological, the small, and the slow,
  • are conservative of all forms of stuff (resources, energy, money, etc.),
  • are conservative in their demands on people
  • are regenerative of systems and supplies.

Techniques for Economy

Here are some of the more important techniques of frugality:

Resourcefulness: Reduce, reuse, rot, repurpose, return, repair, recycle, refuse, make it over, make do, make it over, do without.

This could more simply be known as the “use less stuff” technique —

  • the less stuff you use and need —
    • the less money you spend,
    • the less resources you use,
    • the less energy you consume.

This is a roadmap of how we can care for people, care for the planet, and care for the future by demonstrating voluntary restraint in the use of material goods.

It’s not just a mantra to repeat. It is a technique you can use to increase the quality of your life and the resilience of your household systems.

For example — In the kitchen, we may decide that we need additional equipment or changes to things like storage areas, cabinets, etc. If you need to replace or add kitchen cabinets, look for used options or make new ones from recycled materials. If you need a stand mixer, shop at flea markets, garage sales, pawn shops and buy one used. I have an excellent quality stand mixer that cost me $2 at a garage sale. It’s old but it has served me well.

If you buy new, look for quality.

If I needed an item, and I couldn’t find it in the aftermarket, I would not necessarily buy the cheapest new item on the shelf. I would look for quality, and buy new only after doing consumer research to determine which option would serve the best over the long haul. I use canning jars every year that were bought more than 60 years ago by my grandmother.

Regeneration: Renew, Reproduce, Reorganize

Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, every time we do some useful work, we lose a little bit of it. While we must economize and be resourceful (reuse, recycle, etc.) we need to regenerate. The “Three R’s” of regeneration are Renew, Reproduce, and Reorganize. We may find that something we do is inefficient and wasteful and a better method would help us use our available resources more wisely. So we reorganize what we do. When we plant gardens and grow food, we reproduce. When we develop and expand friendships and networks of mutual help and support, that’s reproduction. When we reinvent old things, that’s renewal.

Resilience: Resist, Responsive, Redundant.

Resilience is an important design principle for all of our economic design. If something collapses or breaks, it can be hard to repair and replace, especially if it is something complex like an economy. The Three R’s of Resilience are Resist, Respond, and Redundant. When faced with economic irrationality, we find a duty to resist. Elsewhere in iPermie is this referred to as "persistence." If there is a problem, prompt response of repair, protection, and resistance is critical. Redundancy is one of the basic permaculture design principles. Critical functions should be supported by many elements and systems.

Learn the difference between needs, wants, and greeds. When it comes to wants, learn to discern between "nice but not necessary" and "frivolous waste." Scrutinize your budget and take action as necessary.

This is a way of evaluating your expenditures in order to free up funds for savings and investing in your future. Instead of buying new clothes, you could shop at thrift stores. Instead of going to a move theater, you could use a service to download it from the internet or rent a CD from a local shop. Etc.

Avoid money traps and pits.

Debt is a money pit. Don’t borrow money to implement your permaculture designs. Keep your design recommendations consistent with your actual and expected household resources.

Avoid Big Box Stores, every one of them is a trap set for your money. They try to sell us convenience. What we end up with is cheap schlock at a high price and we get all kinds of externalized costs. It’s all manipulated consciousness. And it’s not as if you save money at big box stores.

For example —

Preparing meals from basic ingredients, even if you pay more for locally produced meats (for example) is more frugal than buying supermarket prepared foods and boxed dinners, even if you pay a bit more for the locally raised meats and organic vegetables.

Think big and think small.

Save pennies — here's a money pit: “Oh well, a few cents don’t matter”. Times however many times a day you say this to yourself times 365 days/year times 50 working years equals a lot of money.

Look for big money pits that can be eliminated or slashed. Staycation instead of travel-cation. I traded my “monthly plan” cell phone for a pay-as-you-go cheapo cell phone, and am selective at who gets that number. Voila, one hundred bucks a month savings in my monthly utility bills. That’s $1200/year!

Make the least possible change for the greatest possible impact.

We’ve seen this before, and we will see it again. It is at once principle, strategy, and technique. You may be doing some things in a permacultural way already. Find those things during your observation phase and reinforce them with connections and functions.

Be informed about “local market conditions.”

Be aware of your local market ecology. Watch for cycles and swings and when you have to buy, buy on the low end. When I bought my Geo Metro, I was lucky, the big price run-up in oil hadn’t started and I got it for $675. A year later, the price of oil and gasoline had increased and judging from the advertisements, the cost of a Geo Metro had doubled. As oil prices subsequently declined, so did the price of the Geo Metro. One practical advice item is to buy Metros when they are cheap, to prepare for the next run-up in energy prices. “The time to buy the extremely fuel efficient vehicle is before the next energy crisis hits.”

If the flow is against you, use a pattern to deflect the flow and/or use its energy in a beneficial way.

Social norms are fine as long as the reinforce the good, the beautiful, the useful, and the virtuous. When they drive gluttony, waste, and unsustainability, they are bad. Consider the rush right now to expensive electronics and phones, which replace perfectly usable “out of date” phones and electronics. On one hand, we have an enormous amount of resources going in to the manufacture of new electronics and phones. On the other hand, we have a steady stream to the landfills of waste electronics and phones that are perfectly functional.

What kind of a pattern could you use to deflect the flow of social norms that work against you? Perhaps you could resist the urge to have the latest, in favor of the “next to the latest.” When everyone sells their tech because something new has come out, that seems to me to be the time to upgrade. You get the benefits of newer tech, without the expense of brand-new tech. You remain a year or two “behind” the crowd. Is this such a problem?

Curb the urge for instant gratification.

Grocery stores and gambling casinos prosper from the inability of people to curb their urge for instant gratification. When we spend money without a plan, we spend more than we need, for items of dubious utility. Design well, spend in accordance with your design, and you will do much better.

The Bottom Line

Permaculture design is inherently frugal, and frugality is inherently permacultural. Strengthen your household’s resilience and increase your quality of life by rejoicing in the discipline of frugality and your designs for economy. Freedom isn’t free. It doesn’t have to be expensive either.

You do not save money by spending money. You save money by not spending money.

OK, there are certain times and situations where you should spend some money to save some money over time. The classic example of this is energy conservation. Insulate now, pay less later. But many of the ads you see with the "spend now you will save later" promise are money grabs.