iPermie: the Introduction

Have you ever seen the dawn? Not a dawn groggy with lack of sleep or hectic with mindless obligations and you about to rush off on an early adventure or business, but full of deep silence and absolute clarity of perception? A dawning which you truly observe, degree by degree. It is the most amazing moment of birth. And more than anything it can spur you to action. Have a burning day. — Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

From the halls of power to the fortress tower,

not a stone will be left on stone.

Let the king beware for your justice tears

ev'ry tyrant from his throne.

The hungry poor shall weep no more,

for the food they can never earn;

There are tables spread, ev'ry mouth be fed,

for the world is about to turn.

My heart shall sing of the day you bring.

Let the fires of your justice burn.

Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,

and the world is about to turn!

— From Canticle of the Turning, by Rory Cooney, tune: Star of the County Down

iPermie is a work of love and sorrow.

It flows from love for people, love for the planet, and love for the future. It is informed by sorrow for people, sorrow for the planet, and sorrow for the future.

My original plan was to write 30,000 words. When I got there, I hadn't finished the basics, there was a lot of love, and a lot of sorrow, left to write. So I kept on keeping on. From the beginning, my imperative was for a comprehensive, holistic view of the signs of these times. I hope I have laid out, as best I could, a path forward that can be accessed by anyone with the will to do some thinking, observing, and planning. Money is mostly optional.

This book is not a litany of scary stories. It has a few — everyone likes a little adrenalin rush now and then — but that's not the theme.

This book is about hope – it's about how we can create self-fulfilling prophecies of a better world, where we care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future.

It's hard to do this in the present world, because everything has been designed, from the ground up, to consume, pollute, and waste on the most grand scale possible. It simply isn't possible for everyone to make the best decisions all the time.

That shouldn't stop us from making better decisions, or from making good decisions, or to avoid making bad decisions.

This is the permaculture principle of succession at work. We start small, or we don't start at all. We take beginning baby steps, or we never learn to walk. Indeed, before we can walk, we must learn to crawl, and before we can crawl, we must master turning over. This book is about those basic first steps and also about the mature best steps that must come for all sooner or later. It is about incremental change for the good and watching out for the big score. It is about creating a world where it is easier to make good, better, and best choices and to avoid making bad choices.

This book is about empowerment. Far too many of us feel powerless in the fact of the gigantic forces at work in this world. We don't understand the power we retain within and we certainly don't want to trust ourselves. This book will help you understand that everything that you need is already within you. Sure, you may need some details, skills, and etc., but you already have the most important things you need for the future. We begin our journey as you and I learn to trust ourselves. I know, it's a radical concept. You can do it.

Like anything else, it may take some praxis. That's not a misspelled word, it's a concept so important it has to be mentioned in this introduction. Praxis is action coupled with reflection. We act, then we reflect on what we did. Our next action grows out of our previous action with more reflection afterwards. Feedback is more than a squeal in the sound system.

This book is best approached in the context of the community and for many of its modern readers, that will be the biggest challenge of all. But the plain truth of the matter is that we are not going to make it into the future that is coming at us in our little independent households of one to three point two people. No one was able to survive that way in the past and it won't be true in the future either. Community will make or break our response to these challenging times. We can design new forms of ecovillages nestled within the modern metropolis and live in them, reinhabiting our urban areas on behalf of ourselves, the planet, and the future.

This book's point of reference is the City. The majority of the world's peoples now live in cities. If half of everyone now in a city decided to abandon it for a rural area, the result would be a major worldwide ecological catastrophe. Cities offer many opportunities for sustainable and frugal living, a claim which will become more understandable as this book progresses.

To date, most permaculture work has been identified with particular sites, typically in rural or peri-urban areas. That's fine and important work but going forward we need to pay more attention to how we can live sustainably in the city. That context demands much work with invisible structures – which is permie-speak for organizations, systems, businesses, governments, etc. – that will help us to live more sustainably in the city. If you live in a high rise apartment building, you won't be able to raise all your own food. So structures such as local food cooperatives and farmers markets are basic building blocks of living sustainably in a city.

I have a particular concern for people of low to moderate incomes. Our household is not wealthy but even so we have managed to do quite a bit to reduce our impact upon the ecology where we live. Thus, there is a definite focus throughout the iPermie text on what people can do to care for the earth, care for people, and have a care for the future without spending big piles of cash they probably don't have. Indeed, besides the sustainability aspects, iPermie could be considered a manual of "champagne living on a beer budget," which is to say, "How to have a great life without spending big piles of cash and going deeply into debt."

Permaculture, as a design system, works every bit as well for people in cities as it does for those in rural areas. It is not primarily about growing food or using perennial plants in landscapes. It is about designing ways to live in accordance with the permaculture ethics, so that we care for people, care for the planet, and have a care for the future as we design and embrace voluntary limits on consumption and ensure that surplus circulates and does not centralize or concentrate.

This book, and its 14 sections, 285 chapters, and 388,000 words, is your good-life design guide that will help you create your own self-fulfilling prophecy of hope, beauty, and wisdom.

Don't be dismayed by the length of iPermie or a first impression of its complexity.

Take this one chapter at a time, reflect on what you have read, and imagine how you could put it into praxis in your own life. We begin close to home, at our own individual doorsteps and go forward from there.

The direction you choose to face determines whether you're standing at the end or the beginning of a road. — Richelle E. Goodrich