Can anyone name a course you took in high school or college that combined subject matter from both ethics and physics? I didn't think so.
There is an obvious reason for this. From the time of the ancient Greeks, our western European (and now global) civilization has drawn a firm conceptual boundary between "the sciences" (the study of how things work) and "the humanities" (the study of what things mean, of what we value as humans living in society). So no math, physics, or chemistry curriculum, nor any of the applied professional fields based on this curriculum, such as mechanics, engineering, or design, has anything at all to say about ethics.
I bring this up because one of the most transformative--even subversive-- aspects of Bill Mollison's Permaculture concept, and the worldwide grassroots movement that it has spawned, is that it conjoins both ethics and engineering. This is truly revolutionary.
Accordingly in Brett Pritchard's "pyramid" synthesizing Mollison's core ideas that I have been sharing, the top tiers set forth core ethics for living together on a finite, living planet (Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share), and elaborate these, as we have seen, into Ethics on natural systems and on resource management. These lead necessarily (not arbitrarily) to his three principles regarding Energy, a concept which is at the very foundation of physics. Here they are: Principles of Energy Inputs, Energy Cycling, and Energy Efficiency.
...and here are Pritchard's "mind maps" providing a practical illustration of these principles:
In short, when Mollison created a new frame of reference that embraces both ethics and energy management, he left Western Industrial Civilization behind and spawned a new Gaian culture--one that could, in theory, save the planet!
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