Why We Need Permaculture Ethics
Approx. 10 minute read time. Republished in Permaculture Design Magazine issue #127.
During a time where we are facing multiple ecological challenges, we need systems that encourage a symbiotic human relationship with the natural world. We must avoid the proliferation of, and continuation of, practices and ways of life that glorify the desecration of our most precious resources.
All people have the right to clean water, clean air, healthy and nutritious food, and to an environment supportive of their potential to contribute to a robust society. A society that at its foundation has meaning and purpose available for all people, and where its members have the opportunity to live in harmony with one another.
We all seek communities where we are able to contribute, and where we can be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Sadly, many have been disconnected from this innate desire through culturally and socially constructed ways of being in the world that run counter to our biological tendencies of cooperation and mutual support. Humans were not successful throughout our history because of competition, demeaning one another, arguing about politics never-endingly, or by trashing our only hospital planet. We were successful by way of our social bonds, and the ability to work together to overcome challenges that we, as a group, faced.
Permaculture offers us guiding ethics, and principles of design that will both help us cultivate and lead healthier lives, and also interact with one another in ways that help us step back a bit toward a more egalitarian and communal way of being in this world. The three ethics laid down in the core permaculture teachings provide us a way–through the lens of indigenous and spiritual wisdom of yore–of looking at ourselves as part of a larger system; a part of Nature, not apart from it.
Since the industrial era began, the common running theme has been one of extraction, exploitation, and an incessant craving for growth at the expense of exhausting the ability of natural systems to regenerate. Permaculture is a system that all people should, in my humble opinion, come to understand due to its ability to condense very important principles and practices into one understandable and digestible method of skillfully living in our modern world, one that is adaptable and applicable in all cultures, and in all parts of the world.
Ethics, generally speaking, provide us with a framework for restraint, and they allow us the opportunity to evaluate our impulses and survival instincts. Ethics furnish us an evaluative tool to observe personal and social constructs that typically lean toward self-interest, and drive many human behaviors. They are able to guide us toward a more enlightened way of achieving a more expansive self-interest–a ‘self-interest’ that broadens our understanding of what really is ours, and what us really means on the planetary scale.
When Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term ‘permaculture’ in the mid-1970s, they were envisioning an integrated and dynamic methodology of perennial and self-perpetuating plant and animal systems useful to humans, a permanent agriculture. But as the ideology evolved, and its applicability to other areas of human society became obvious, permaculture molted into something better thought of as permanent culture.
The three ethics offered to us by permaculture are quite simple. They are: care for the earth, care for people, and fair share.
Care For The Earth
Mother Earth is our keeper. She is our protector. She is our provider. She is the only source of the essentials to life: air, water, food, and the materials for shelter. The living systems of our wonderful planet are interconnected, and the wellspring of their wisdom is beyond any naive human who thinks they are able to master them, or bend them to their will without detrimental consequences.
When we look back to indigenous cultures and traditional people who lived much more sustainably than we do in modern, industrial times; we find a drive to protect not only their communities, but to protect the air they breathe, the water they drink, and an honoring of the land upon which they walk. These cultures understood the deep connection that these systems had to one another (the entwined nature of Nature) and they knew their sustenance was drawn from a spring of life that could evaporate if not cared for properly.
To care for the earth is to care for all living and nonliving things; animals, plants, land, water, air, and so on. Thriving ecosystems summon their strength through the diversity of species with many overlapping ecological functions, and the nonliving aspects of those ecosystems are also paramount to this flourishing. To fully understand this gives us the potential to understand earth care and how we must honor this complexity.
Care Of People
Humans have achieved great feats in our long history, and we have achieved these through great levels of cooperation as one of the most social animals on the planet. Not only are we able to work together to reach goals beyond the abilities of a single human, we are extremely educable. We are willing and able to learn, share, and pass down extraordinary amounts of knowledge and skills.
Beyond our physical interrelations that help us achieve things like building shelters, forming businesses, distributing food and medicine, or many other activities we get up to, we psychologically need social connections and community. Community is known to benefit our mental health, and with rising rates of loneliness around the globe, communities are more important than ever.
We live in a time where people are more skeptical than ever of people they do not know, and many selfishly pursue their own interests without much care for even their neighbors. Care of people helps promote the idea that we must take responsibility for ourselves and our actions, but we also have a responsibility to foster and care for our community, and to be a beneficial part of it.
Through building trusting bonds not only with ourselves and those closest to us, but also with the community around us, we can help foster supportive and emotionally healthy communities that can function as collaborative places where we can thrive and live full lives.
Fair Share
This ethic is sometimes better understood as “returning the surplus back to Earth and people”. It is obvious that resources are finite, so we must grasp the idea that over extraction brings us to a point where said resources are put in serious danger.
Much of Western society rests on the assumption that “continuous growth” is possible, and a good thing–for the economy, for ‘shareholders’, etcetera. The systems of our planet have a carrying capacity. This means that their ability to regenerate can be deteriorated by too much extraction or use of any particular resource base. In a system that is finite, where there are limits; how can continuous growth be possible? Quite simply, it is not possible, and we are destroying our planet in the process of trying to fool ourselves.
The goal of fair share is to encourage us to reflect upon our impact, and to think about how we can live more sustainably. We should always consider how we can give back to the system. Something like composting is one way we can do this, by taking our organic waste and returning them into the natural cycle of decomposition in the proper way. Earth’s living systems sustain our lives, and an exploitation mentality is one that has caused much damage. There is no “Planet B”.
When we do have surplus of time, money, energy, and other resources, considering how we can put those resources back into the system and help build community is an excellent practice. These moments when we can give back–to the land, or to our communities–allows us a moment of introspection to realize that if we only took our fair share, then there would be enough for everybody, and then some!