Permaculture Ethics

From How To Live Wiki

This article was originally written for an online workshop I taught on Kitchen Permaculture.

What is permaculture?

This is actually a bigger question than can be addressed in one little workshop article, but here is how Bill Mollison, one of the co-founders of permaculture, defines the topic:

“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

The role of personal responsibility.

At its most fundamental level, permaculture represents the willingness to take personal responsibility for our actions on the planet. It may not be physically possible for us to become “perfectly permacultural,” but that situation should not be for lack of personal effort.

Getting into permaculture design is sort of like giving sight to the blind. We may think we have a good handle on “all that is”, at least as it impacts us and those we love, but in a moment, that illusion can be swept away and we can find ourselves in what appears to be a completely different situation. Sometimes I think that all permaculture education materials should include a disclaimer. . . “WARNING: The study of permaculture design may be hazardous to your complacency, indifference, and lack of personal responsibility.”

Remember the old story of the three persons examining an elephant in the dark, and then attempting to describe what the animal looks like? The man who touched the tail said the elephant was like a snake. The one who felt the tusk said it was like a plow. The third who felt the ear said it was like a hand fan. When the lights are suddenly turned on, the examiners learn the truth, and are undoubtedly surprised by how big and comprehensive that truth is, and how different it is from what they had previously thought.

The question of the hour is – how shall we live on this planet, with our fellow human beings?

Mollison says, and the permaculture movement teaches, that this begins with a personal ethical decision to take responsibility for our actions, in effect, to turn on the lights and open our eyes and see everything as it is, and the impacts and consequences of our actions upon the Earth, our fellow humans, the planetary biosphere, and ourselves as individual persons.

There are any number of voices out there these days which discourage or de-emphasize the importance of personal effort. They will use the Jevon’s Paradox (the claim that increased efficiency in the use of a resource will inevitably increase the utilization of the resource) to discourage energy conservation. People say that personal efforts and lifestyle changes have minimal impact compared to large industrial uses.

The response of permaculture is – so what? (Here I should include an icon indicating an upraised eyebrow and maybe hands held palm up.) We got into the present situation as many many people made bad decisions over a long period of time. It would be nice to find a short-cut to get us out of the present situation, a magic permacultural wand that could be waved and make all things better, but thus far nothing appears to fit that bill. We are left with the thought that we will get out of our problems the way we got into them – many many people making good, better, and best decisions over a long period of time. So never let anyone tell you that what you do doesn’t matter, because it does.

We humans often over-estimate 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 likely consequences of our actions are, at least, it has never stopped me from doing so. But 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 whats appears to be likely at the present moment.

And there is only one place that that better future is going to come from – the willingness of people to take personal responsibility for their actions. If we think we can trust the government to do the right thing, well, that’s an even more skitzy thought than what we are talking about here. Moreover, there are certain dangers to relying on government as the source of our salvation from the consequences of our own actions.

Government actions, which compel large numbers of people to act in certain ways, have major impacts. If the compelled action is benign, then the consequences are good. But if not, then not, and on a very big and dangerous scale. Government mistakes wreck entire civilizations, and have done so frequently in human history.

I am not taking a complete anarcho-libertarian view of the utility of government, but I am saying that we start with our own households, or we don’t start at all. When the government begins to do the right thing, it will only be because millions and millions of people have started to do the right thing in their own households. If tens and hundreds of millions of people remain mired in lifestyles of acquisition and consumption, it is folly to think that the government would ever legislate anything other than more acquisition and more consumption. It didn’t happen at Easter Island, nor with the Chacoans, Mayans, or Romans. It didn’t happen in 1789 or 1917 and it won’t happen with us either.

Why was the Civil Rights movement successful in ending legally mandated racial segregation and discrimination? Because millions of people came to understand that racial injustice was a social evil that could no longer be tolerated as a juridical reality in our society. It wasn’t everyone, and many people opposed the movement. But as people’s attitudes changed, so did the laws, and we are better today because of this. Racial problems remain, but the willingness of people 50 years ago to leave aside what they had been taught about the “proper relationships of the races” allowed space for governmental action that ended that particular structure and opened doors of opportunity for millions of people.

We should also not forget that this movement began with the individual decisions of small groups of people across the South to directly challenge segregation by attempting to enroll in white schools, by sitting at the white-only lunch counters, and by refusing to sit in the back of the bus. That last decision was made by one middle-aged woman, and it galvanized an entire community.

This level of understanding and acceptance of responsibility is what the present moment calls us to. We can therefore reasonably ask ourselves, “Now what do we do?

That is what permaculture design is for – to help us decide what we should do with our lives of responsibility and awareness. We proceed from the general to the particular, and we begin with ethics.

Ethics of permaculture.

There are three ethics of permaculture:

Care for the Earth
Care for People
Care for the Future through acceptance of voluntary limits and fair distribution of surplus. I often formulate this as "have a care for the future".

Secular and universal.

These are secular ethics. Which is to say, they are not tied to any particular religion or moral system or philosophy. They transcend all such human boundaries and categories. This isn’t to say that our individual religious and moral beliefs are not important, because they obviously are to many if not most of us. It is to say that we can come together, in our diversity, at a common “table of ethical fellowship”, in the face of our shared destiny as human beings.

This isn’t some kind of faux “differences don’t matter”, but instead a basic, irreducible minimum that can govern our inter-relationships as individuals, families or households, races, religions, nations, peoples. In philosophical and theological terminology, permaculture ethics are an aspect of “natural law”.

All people – be they Buddhist, Catholic, Animist, or Atheist, and all points in between – can care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future by accepting voluntary limits. All people – be they Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, Constitutionalists, or Socialists, and all points in between – can care for the Earth, care for people, and and care for the future by accepting voluntary limits. All people, be they European or Asian, African or Polynesian, and all points in between – can care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future by accepting voluntary limits.

This doesn’t mean that Buddhism isn’t important to Buddhists, or Catholicism isn’t important to Catholics. It means that we can agree in our common humanity to care for the Earth, care for people, and care for the future by accepting voluntary limits on our consumption.

Care of the Earth

The Earth is our home, the only one we have. We cannot exist apart from the natural systems of the planet and its biosphere. We’ve tried – the Biosphere experiment in Arizona was hopefully to be the first step towards designing human habits that could operate independently of their surroundings, without re-supply. Presumably, this was to be applied in the context of space travel and colonies on the Moon or other planets like Mars.

However, the project failed and ended early. I suppose this isn’t definitive proof of the impossibility of the hypothesis, but it was a pretty valiant try (in scientific and human terms) that incorporated a lot of research and design effort and resources. One thing it taught us is that the Earth’s biosphere is more complex than we previously thought.

Long-term thinking is essential to permaculture design. We often read of the “Seven Generation” principle followed by Native Americans. Another story told is of a cathedral in England, whose roof beams were riddled with insects causing the building to be in danger of collapse. The forester of the area, however, saved the day by taking the Cathedral caretakers to a nearby forest, which was planted when the Cathedral was built for the explicit purpose of providing replacement roof beams when the originals needed replacement. Both of these stories encourage us to look backwards as well as forwards, to see how we got where we are, and where we will go.

That kind of thinking is utterly foreign to the modern just-in-time mindset.

The permaculture ethic of Care of the Earth starts us on a journey that leads in the direction of understanding that the impact of our actions propagates far beyond our households and even our life spans. I say “starts. . . leads. . . direction. . . understanding. . . “ because this isn’t something that happens overnight. It is a seed of a tree that starts very small, but grows large and magnificent with time and nurture.

Care of People

Based on the first ethic, we can say that permaculture is earth-centric. But permaculture is also human-centric, in that it is used by human beings to make design decisions that govern our lives and that mitigate the impact of our “lifestyles of the proud and powerful” upon our planetary neighbors.

We are beings who are consciously aware of our existence and are capable of making decisions that have enormous impacts – for good or for ill (as I often say) – upon everything that is around us. We can remember our history, and we can learn lessons from it. Indeed, we often say, “Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.” This, of course, is honored more in rhetoric than in reality, but the very ability to formulate the concept suggests there remains hope.

If there is anything evident from human history, it is that if we want to care for the planet, we must work for human justice and peace. Throughout our history, economic irrationality, oppression, coercion, and war have driven grave harm to our planet’s biosphere.

The lyrics of this song – “Renunciation” – from the “Little Red Songbook” of the Industrial Workers of the World, illustrate this better than I can, I think. Sing them to the tune “Auld Lang Syne”; the lyrics are by Joachim Raucher:

When hungry millions are unfed
And the little orphans weep,
I cannot eat in peace my bread,
Nor sing my grief to sleep.
When thoughts arising from the heart
Are hampered in their flight,
I cannot sit and muse apart
Upon a dreamy height.

When craven lies oft seek to blind
The eyes of blazing Truth,
I cannot turn my maddened mind
To songs of love and youth,
Nor can I sing in lyric strains
Of private, little woes,
When Greed is reaping golden gains
From bloody seeds it sows.

Care for the Future via Voluntary Limits and Fair Distribution of Surplus

In many permaculture teaching lineages, the wording of the third ethic abandons the formulation “Care of” and speaks instead of limits. I do not disagree that the third ethic is about accepting limits, but I agree with some in the movement who formulate the third ethic positively as “Care for the Future”, then with the clause about accepting voluntary limits.

I also think that in permaculture there is an aspect of “Caring for the Past”. We have to look backwards as much as we look forwards, in part to conserve the good things our ancestors bequeathed to us, and to understand the mistakes and problems our ancestors also gave to us. Those who do not learn the mistakes of history will repeat them.

Permaculture accepts the necessity of what is sometimes referred to as “distributive justice”, which is the idea that there should be justice in the distribution of the goods of the earth. If a permaculturist looks at a given community or nation or civilization, and sees people deprived of a sufficiency of food, water, shelter, while others live indulgent, privileged lives, and also sees natural systems in decline, then we see a problem.

It is fashionable to blame the poor for their own situation. And of course, in any particular situation there can be a complex series of factors/issues that combine to drive poverty. But those who are attached to the “the poor are personally irresponsible and bring their problems on themselves” attitude don’t see all the realities of our modern systems. We in the United States are rich by world standards, in part because we use our economic and military power to ensure that a steady stream of resources from throughout the world flows into our economic systems, provisioning gluttony and consumption. Because we take so much, there is less for others.

One example of this process at work was the recent energy crisis, which drove food riots in poor countries. Costs were rising due to the increased price of energy and the diversion of food grains to biofuel enterprises. People elsewhere went hungry so that we could shave a few cents off the price of a gallon of gasoline.

Note that this isn’t a claim that any particular system “should” be politically enacted to redress this situation. Instead, it is an observation that systems that breed poverty and centralize wealth are defective at the systemic level. Better design is likely to produce better results.

Caring for the future with our acceptance of limits and distributive justice also suggests that human beings should not grab all the available resources for ourselves. We are not the only creatures on the planet, and there should be room for all of Creation. If the teleological purpose of human beings is to turn the planet into one giant landfill, poison the waters and atmosphere in the process, and kill off all other living creatures, then we should get a better existential purpose, quickly. If we think we can get by on the planet without our fellow creatures of the air, land, water, and soil, we are delusional.

If we change our thinking, so that there is room for all, this must inevitably have an impact on our actions, the way we live.

Permaculture design can give us tools to direct our actions, as we become increasingly willing to accept responsibility, and voluntarily choose to care for the earth, care for people, and care for the future through acceptance of boundaries and limits in our lives so that there can be justice in the distribution of surplus.

By Bob Waldrop, Oklahoma city