permaculture

[Brent Ladd <laddb@ecn.purdue.edu>]

 

The genius of permaculture is its recognition that good design--of gardens,
buildings, communities, or just about anything--is not about the pieces of
the design, but how those pieces are interconnected: the functional
relationships ("relatings"). This is also just about the most difficult part
of permaculture to grasp deeply: I remember when I finally got it, and it's
a joy to see people suddenly get it.

Exactly. Right-on. Amen. When I finished my PDC course I was asked to evaluate
the course. The key learning point for me with permaculture was grasping
the idea that it is the relationship between the "elements" that is important,
not necessarily the elements themselves.

To first grasp this idea I recited a passage from the Tao te Ching that really helped me understand:
"we mold clay into a pot
it is the emptiness inside
that makes the vessel useful"

"we fashion wood for a house
it is the emptiness inside
that makes it liveable"

"we work with what is substantial
but the emptiness is what we use"

The focus is really about relationships rather than elements/objects. Isn't this what the Mystics throughout time have taught?

Obviously what the mainstream worldview is predicated upon is the scientific method and this is where the concepts behind permaculture conflict with the way a lot of people see the world. Although the scientific method has given us a lot of mechanical success (ie computers, surgery technology, etc) it doesn't do much for non-mechanical areas (land, water, air, human relationships,etc), I believe because the scientific method focuses on parts of objects and not on the space within/between.

In my desire to really learn more about this idea of focusing on the "emptiness, relationships, and patterns" I did some reading and researching that has helped me to understand a bit more...
One of the earliest people (I'm sure there are others) in "modern history" I know of to challenge the old mechanical viewpoint of science AND provide another viewpoint that could work was Jan Smuts, a General and political leader in S. Africa early last century. In his book Holism and Evolution (1926, Macmillin) Smuts espoused that Holism is a fundamental operative of the universe. He said "There are no boundries, only wholes within wholes in a variety of patterns. To understand the world, we must first seek to understand the greater whole, which has qualities and characteristics not present in any of the "lesser" wholes that form it."  Smuts came to believe that the world is not made of substance, but of fexible, changing patterns. "If you take patterns as the ultimate structure of the world, it it is arrangements and not stuff that make up the world, then this leads you to the concept of wholes. Wholes have no stuff, they are arrangement." This idea has been taken up in force by Allan Savory of Holistic Management fame. The other main person I know of to put forth a holistic way of seeing was Black Elk (read in Black Elk interviewed by John Niehardt).

In trying to think of a "reductionist" example that I could talk about with a mainstream scientist about this idea of wholes and relationships, I came up with this: A wall is made up of atoms. What makes the wall solid? Thestructure of an atom is made up of mostly emptiness-the substance is only the electrons and nucleus (simplified). How can the wall be solid if it is made up of atoms that are mostly empty space. I have no idea, except to guess that the arrangement of atoms and their relationships in space are what makes the wall solid. I took this by a professor emeritus of physics here and he concurred, but not positively...I'm not sure he knows either :)

This new way of seeing is exciting, but I don't yet understand how to perfect it. I am sort of at the stage of those "mind-teaser" pictures where if you get your eyes to blur out of focus and LOOK PAST the scribbled colors, THEN the real picture comes into focus.
 

 

A big part of the difficulty in grasping Pc is that our culture focuses on
objects--that's where the part of the thread about nouns and reification
(treating the non-material as a thing) comes in. Even when we recognize the
primacy of a process instead of a thing that's affected by that process, our
language naturally converts that process into a thing. Then the process
stops being a "relating" and becomes a static subject (e.g., we talk about
the importance of insectary plants when we really mean the relationship
between insects and plants and our needs). Permaculture fights this trend. A
good example is the way designers avoid a cookie-cutter approach ("every
design needs an herb spiral"--not!) and insist on observing and assessing a
site at length before suggesting solutions.

Permaculture is an attempt to examine the processes that keep natural
systems functioning, to extract the important principles behind those
processes, and then apply those principles to create consciously designed,
sustainable human systems. But a lot of important details can get lost in
translating natural processes to our landscapes. Also, we must make many
assumptions about what relationships are important in an ecosystem (and thus
must be included) and what can be safely ignored. So it's critical to
understand what our assumptions are: what we consider important aspects of
natural processes, why we choose those and not others, what we can be sure
of, what we really don't know but think we know, and whether we're mistaking
our simplified model of a process for the process itself. These difficulties
start to explain why this tool using animal, who has been building things
for roughly a million years, has only in the last few years started coming
up with a rational approach to design.

Fortunately a lot of really bright people have thought about all those
assumptions, and about how to think in terms of processes and relationships
rather than only things: Korsybski, Bateson, Maturana, a bunch of Buddhists,
and the others that John, Sean, Souscayrous, and others have listed.  How do
we know what we know? What filtering and mangling do we do to the things we
observe when they enter our consciousness? What am I leaving out of my
design because of my assumptions about what's important and about what I
know? So I think it's necessary to look at these subjects, or we run the
risk of just plugging various technical bits into our designs without
assessing whether they are appropriate for the culture, the client, or the
land--or whether they are just "things" we like because of our personal
prejudices. (I just heard of a novice designer who went to a ranch and told
the client "well, first you've got to get rid of all your horses, 'cuz
owning horses is wrong." Needless to say, the conversation was over and the
client thinks permaculture is stupid.)

For those of you who are wondering why we're on this thread (are there any
still out there?), does any of this help?

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my new book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm

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--
Brent Ladd
Water Quality Specialist, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1146
Ph: 765-496-6331  Fax: 765-496-1356
Email: laddb@ecn.purdue.edu

Safe Water for the Future Web Site: www.ecn.purdue.edu/safewater

"If there is magic on this planet it is surely found in the spirit of water"-Loren Eiseley