Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] - New Article on Permaculture; What Permaculture Isn't - and Is.

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: <lgaffney@bigpond.com>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: toby@patternliteracy.com
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] - New Article on Permaculture; What Permaculture Isn't - and Is.
  • Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 11:17:44 +1100

Hello Toby



Thank you for this article.



Some comments/questions:-



1. Simply seeking to retain, restore and improve Ecosystem Health
will not deliver healthy ecosystems. Without an accurate and feasible
characterisation on what we understand a healthy ecosystem to be, we are
directionless.



2. The following paper by E. J. S. Hearnshaw of Lincoln
University addresses the concept of Ecosystem Health.
http://researcharchive.lincoln.ac.nz/dspace/handle/10182/3728

The paper examines various models of Ecosystem Health, such as Naturalness,
Genetic Fitness, Climax, Diversity, Stability and Keystone Species. The
paper indicates that if Ecosystem Health is to be used as a means to examine
the performance of Ecosystems then coherent, clear and quantifiable
definitions must be crafted so that the concept can be delineated
operational.



3. I am unaware that we currently have the "metrics to gauge
ecosystem health". Although much work that has been done in this area, I
think science is still testing hypotheses with very little conclusion/s yet
drawn. Is there scientific consensus around an "index of ecosystem health
indicators" that can be applied "fairly universally"?


4. In Australia I have noticed Public agencies (Natural Resource
Management) have been liberally using the term Ecosystem Health over the
last few years. More recently such Agencies are replacing their objective of
maintaining or improving ecosystem health with that of maintaining or
improving the resilience of natural ecosystems. Is it possible that by
having these allusive/nebulous objectives such agencies are able to avoid
assessment & monitoring of properties of ecosystems better able to be
measured currently, such as biodiversity, soil fertility etc.? If that
is so, the Permaculture Community should try & avoid that.



5. Can metrics of Ecosystem Health be used by the appropriator of
the "permaculture tool kit" to evaluate the success of their onsite
permaculture design?



6. Can the same set of metrics of Ecosystem Health be used by the
urban permaculture designer as for the rural permaculture designer?



7. Indeed can the term "Ecosystem" be realistically applied to
the on ground product of permaculture design or are we just kidding
ourselves?



8. Where/How does the permaculture designer draw the ecosystem
boundaries upon which to apply the metrics of Ecosystem Health?
Specifically whose human needs are being met whilst enhancing which
ecosystem where?



9. Perhaps the Permaculture Community should be devising their
own set of metrics to assess whether or not the goals or objectives of
Permaculture are being met. Watching a Lewins Honey Eater eating the
caterpillars off our grapevine the other day, suggested to me that the
number of bird species and their relative abundances within a "Permaculture
Design" may be one appropriate line of enquiry to this end. But the species
and appropriate abundances would be situation specific and not universal.



So it seems to me that whilst Permaculture is "notoriously hard to define",
measuring the success of Permaculture Design in relation to its goals may be
even harder.

This is a conversation the Permaculture Community has to have. Thanks to you
& Rafter Ferguson for commencing it.





Laurence Gaffney





Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:53:09 -0800

From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>

Subject: [permaculture] New article on permaculture

To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>

Message-ID: <BAAD8073-04D2-4367-8AC2-7070DBC9741E@patternliteracy.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii



Some of what rafter had posted on his website recently made me do some more
thinking about why permaculture is so hard to define. It resulted in a new
article at my website,



http://www.patternliteracy.com/668-what-permaculture-isnt-and-is



To sum it up: For millennia humans just focused on meeting their needs,
without needing to care about the consequences. Now we have to consider how
to meet our needs while preserving ecosystem health (thanks, rafter!). That
a huge paradigm shift. Permaculturists often mistake permaculture for that
paradigm shift. But permaculture is better thought of as the design approach
that's one the new tools needed for that paradigm shift. It's not the
movement, the philosophy, or the paradigm itself. It's an approach to
solving the problems that this new paradigm makes clear.



Hope you enjoy it.



Toby

http://patternliteracy.com







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page