Folks are sometimes surprised when they come to a workshop expecting to learn gardening tricks and we start out talking about ethics. That Permaculture is an ethical system first and foremost is not immediately apparent when one looks at the physical systems that many Permaculture designers work with — a greywater system or a food forest is something that, for folks trained to have so-called “Western” eyes, does not immediately appear to have much relationship to ethics. But in fact since it’s our ethics that guide all of our decisions — whether we are trained to notice that or not — every system is an ethical system, Permaculture or otherwise.
The three ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Shares are the starting point of Permaculture, the foundation that we build all of our systems on, and bring the importance of relationships right into the middle of every decision that we make as Permaculture designers. If I wanted to describe our inherent connectedness to someone who doesn’t understand it, the Permaculture ethics would be a good place to start. Earth Care first, because all of our wealth, resources, sustenance, and even the bodies we reside in come from the earth, and depend completely on the balanced functioning of earth systems in order to provide for us. We can’t provide for ourselves if we don’t provide for the earth systems that make that provisioning possible. Second, People Care, because we are people and we deal in the realm of people. We are not trying to save the earth from people, we are trying to save the earth by saving the people because we are a part of the earth. We are designing systems to meet our needs as people because we are part of the earth, and that means we need to meet the needs of all the people. We can’t meet our first ethic if we don’t meet the second, because people who don’t have their needs met are often presented with limited choices that make it difficult to care for the earth and care for themselves at the same time. One leads to the other, and very neatly and sensibly to the third ethic of Fair Shares, which means to share the benefits so that the whole system becomes richer, which makes life more abundant for everyone and everything that relies on the system — people, plants, animals, and the earth. And then we find ourselves right back at the beginning, in a cycle of mutually beneficial relationships.
I often find the ethics of Permaculture deceptively simple. They seem so straightforward and obvious that it’s difficult to know what to do with them. One looks at them and goes “well, duh… obviously we need to do those things!” But what does that really mean? Coming from a world that is so clearly not functioning on that basis right now, how do we even start to imagine making these ethics come alive in our day to day existence? If Permaculture is about doing what we can from where we are with what we have, how do we start to change something so fundamental as our ethical basis? At the same time, how can we possibly change anything else if we don’t do that?
This might be the central problem of those trying to enact Permaculture in their daily lives, as central to our basic practise as the ethics themselves are to the whole design system that is Permaculture. One of the things that makes it challenging is one of the things that I encounter over and over in my work as a Permaculture teacher and activist, and that is the dominant model of understanding which so many of us have inherited through our education and our society. Many of us were taught that there is one truth, one answer, one right way to do things that is external to each individual, which we learn from authorities who have that answer in their tight little fists. And of course, just like everything else in Permaculture, figuring out how to live the ethics doesn’t work that way. We all have to figure it out for ourselves. For a lot of folks, that’s unfamiliar territory and that makes it a little scary – or sometimes a lot scary.
I had the privilege of leading a workshop with Village Vancouver last month called Permaculture Design for Community Resilience, combining the introductory foundations of Permaculture design through the lens of organizing for community resilience and Transition. It was a great experience, and one of the things that really stuck out for me came when we were discussing the three ethics, and it got me thinking about the small changes in the feel of our daily lives that signify deep, lasting changes in how our world functions.
One of the ways I like to tackle this tough subject is to invite folks to visualize their way through a day in their life in a world that was designed around these three ethics. What would that look like? How would it feel? How would your day be different than a typical day in your life now, and how would it be the same?
We use this exercise to put together our collective wisdom to make a list of the concrete examples that our imaginations bring us for how we live out these thics in our daily lives. We make a map together of the actions, activities, interactions, and physical elements of our world that can exemplify these ethics, and see which ones fit under one particular ethic and which ones fill one or more of the spaces between them.
One of the things that stuck out particularly for me in this round was something that someone wrote under “people care,” definitely under that title but also edging toward the space that all three ethics share. This person wrote that their meditation included “thinking that today was a good day, and that tomorrow would be too.” Next to it the person put a big arrow pointing to the word “HOPE” in large letters with lots of exclamation points.
What a perfect way to describe the way our world can look and feel when we change our ethics — a small change that gets down to the root, that effects everything that comes after. I love this exercise because it brings our academic discussions about what Permaculture is into our personal reality — we get into a space where we observe not only what we think about these ethics, but how they feel, how we live them. How they actually get into our daily experience.
I often think that this is the biggest measure of how far our transition toward a permanent culture has come — not how big the changes are in our external world, “out there” in the safety of externalized, academic thoughts and public actions, but how closely it enters into the small things that make up our daily experience, how effective we are at turning our Permaculture eyes on ourselves and our personal actions and interactions as well as on our external, material reality. One of David Holmgren’s twelve Principles of Permaculture design is to “Move Slowly, Think Small,” and I think that this measure of change really exemplifies how important that principle is. We can build all sorts of big, impressive projects and do all sorts of things in the external world that bring us lots of attention and appreciation, but if we don’t go home and go to bed feeling happy about our day and hopeful about tomorrow, then what have we changed?
So thanks to that anonymous workshop participant, who like so many folks who come to workshops as “students” has ended up teaching me, the “teacher,” something wonderful and profound. So profound that maybe from now on I’ll modify my definition of Permaculture. I always say that Permaculture is a method of designing human systems that function like natural systems, but maybe now I’ll simplify that even further and say that Permaculture is about learning how to live in a world of hope.
