I my last post I wrote about creating a framework to help us begin to navigate the journey from extractive to regenerative, via sustainable and resilient. Central to the next stage of this framework are the permaculture ethics, which may help guide us as a compass on that journey. In the awareness that these ethics are not familiar to everybody I am going to spend some time sharing a short introduction to them.
The provocation of permaculture design is to bring together three things:
· Systems thinking and design.
· Observing and learning from nature, and by association from indigenous wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge.
· Ethics.
The idea is to bring these three lenses together to create all aspects of human life and habitation in such a way that lessens their impact on the planet, and moves them towards making a positive contribution to the complex ecosystem that we are all part of.
This unique combination is the key at the hear of permaculture design – and one that still remains unique since its original inception by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the early 1970s. It is the interaction between these three elements that is the exciting part. To consider each on their own is not so challenging, but to do all three at once asks us to observe, think and act in ways which really challenge us to live and be in new and different ways.
The ethics which sit within this are seemingly simple:
· People Care
· Earth Care
· Fairshare / Future Care
But if we really think about these three thing in our lives, and use them to help shape the things that we do and the ways that we live. How would it be if we really centred our lives around care for people, care for planet, and a drive for equity and fairness? If we thought about the legacy that our lives will have in the future as much as we think about how it benefits us in the here and now?
It is also worth noting that these three ethics are almost identical to the foundational ideas at the core of most indigenous cultures in the world. This should come as no surprise as when Bill Mollison originally articulated them he had spent a huge amount of time learning from indigenous communities within his home country of Australia. He was open and honest about how inspired he was by the things that he had learned, and by the fact that the ethics that he placed at the heart of permaculture design were deeply indebted to the living culture that he had observed.
I think this acknowledgement and connection is one of the things that I love most about the permaculture ethics. For those of us living within extractive, industrial cultures we may feel that something has gone awry with our way of being. We can tell that we have lost connection to the wild world, and that we are causing great harm to it and by association to ourselves. We know that we need to recalibrate our place in this world but we aren’t quite sure how to do it.
For me the permaculture ethics help us to recreate and re-imagine living cultures wherever we are starting from, but to do so in a way that does not take ideas and practices which our not ours to take. Or to appropriate ways of being that we do not have permission to use. The permaculture ethics help us to cast aside colonial ways of being and to start creating our own new ways that may, in their own way, help to heal the world. And help us to feel like we belong here again.
I realise that I have written more here than I intended to, but before I finish there are two more things that I would like to share.
Firstly it seems clear to me that if you created a Venn diagram that represented an absence of these ethics the climate and ecological crisis would sit at the centre of that diagram in the space where the three circles cross. An absence of all three is, at least in part, what has lead us to this moment of crisis that we find ourselves at.
And secondly, to me the permaculture ethics are all about the manifestation of care in action. When I first learned about them I thought they looked like three separate circles. Three islands of care, which may at times overlap and collide, but which essentially sat side by side.
Now I feel they are more like this:
An amplification of care, getting bigger and bigger, and louder and louder. Moving ever outwards but always starting with ourselves. Because, after all, as a single being which is one tiny part of this complex, entangled universe where else could each of us conceivably start?
Next time I will bring together the ideas from this post and the one before it to start to explore how the ideas from both can come together to help us start to make positive change in the world.