Understanding Permaculture: The Four Pillars

 

Bill Mollison's Permaculture Logo

"We have two choices: A Gaian Future, or No Future."  --Norman Myers

"What is Permaculture?"  Virtually everyone who has developed a keen interest in Permaculture, or received his or her Permaculture Design Certificate, has heard this question from the vast majority of people out there who have either never heard of the term at all, or have heard it only in passing, and have developed stereotypical images of ragged, aging "back-to-the-land" hippies somewhere in the hinterlands, crowding around their woodstoves and strumming their guitars singing "Jeremiah was a Bullfrog" and other old favorites from the late '60s and '70's... 

In fact, Permaculture is something deeper, far more profound than this: it is not just a gardening technique, or even a set of gardening techniques, although gardening is the most common arena for the application of Permaculture principles.  Rather, it can best be understood, in my view, as the convergence of four "E's": Epistemology, Ethics, Ecology, and Energy.  Let's look at these one at a time:

Epistemology: This one takes the most explaining. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge; the study of how we know things or more specifically, the study of the presuppositions that undergird the ways in which we conceptualize our world. And in the West, these presuppositions have been rooted in what Greeks called ideas (after Plato) and what later Latin-speaking scholars called essences or entia.This way of knowing could be symbolized mathematically by saying "X, not Y."  For the Greeks, the whole of epistemic inquiry involved questioning the ways we could define X so as to exclude Y, and vice versa. What, essentially, is X?  We can flesh this out a bit by replacing the empty signifiers X and Y with two actual concepts: "Man" and "Nature."

Since the Agricultural Revolution, which occurred several thousand years before Plato's time, the general assumption among agricultural societies has been that "Man" and "Nature" are separate entities, that "Man" is apart from, not a part of, "Nature," and that "Nature" is a mere "resource" whose value is latent until it is transformed, by "Man," into a commodity--something for his \own personal use, or for sale to someone else. When this way of thinking is applied in practice, it leads exactly to what we have seen ever since the Agricultural Revolution, some 8 to 10 thousand years ago: the progressive transformation of complex, perennial ecosystems into monocultural, annual (and storable) high-carbohydrate grasses like wheat, rice, and corn; the simultaneous explosive growth of human population and the rise of cities and commerce (all dependent on converting nature to commodities). The spinoffs are thus entirely predictable as well: as the topsoil in one area of land was exhausted and as human populations increased, we saw the Age of Empire arise, as cities and states fought each other over access to agricultural land, or displaced indigenous horticultural and nomadic tribes to grab yet more land for conversion to monoculture. Meanwhile both topsoil loss and pollution of air, land, and water accelerated in every area that agriculture reached and transformed. The Industrial Revolution, of course, turbo-charged this process of turning ecosystems into monocultural crops, and replacing lost nutrients in topsoil with artificial fertilizers from fossil fuels--and thereby turning both oil and ecosystems into yet more people!

Permaculture seeks to reverse this whole destructive pattern, right from its epistemological roots. Rather than starting with an emphasis on entities--"Man" vs. "Nature"--it starts with an emphasis on relationships. Rather than X being defined as not Y, the expression of relatedness would be "X is X because Y is Y (and vice versa): "This is because that is," as the Buddha succinctly put it; an insight symbolized  by the familiar Tai Chi, or Yang/Yin Symbol in Chinese culture:

In this relational understanding, we see that humanity (not just "man") is what it is because nature is what it is--that we are a part of, not apart from "nature."  Hence we need a new name for "nature" that captures this inclusive relationship, and the obvious choice is "Gaia"--the ancient Greek Earth goddess, a name that has been recycled more recently to refer to the systemic view of the biosphere (including humanity) as a Complex Adaptive System. So this is the first pillar of Permaculture--a new understanding of ourselves as Gaians--as part of, rather than apart from, the biological world we inhabit.

Ethics: This new Gaian understanding of nature as a complex adaptive system, and of ourselves as a part of that system, subject to its production rules, leads directly to the second pillar of Permaculture: ethics. According to its founder, Bill Mollison, all Permaculture design is rooted in three core ethics: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share. The first, Earth Care, takes priority: in every decision a Permaculture designer makes, he or she must first consider the effects of that decision on the larger systems of which his project is a part--above all, the biosphere or Gaia. Whenever two or more design options are available, the mandate is to choose the design option that has the least adverse effect--or the greatest potential benefits--to the ecosystem and the bioregion we inhabit--and by extension, to the entire living planet. People Care, the second Ethic, begins with the assumption that we are part of nature, not apart from it, so that in taking good care of our ecosystems, we are also taking good care of one another. 

The third core ethic, "Fair Share" is more problematic. Various permaculturists have proposed alternatives like "Future Care" or "Reinvesting the Surplus" as alternatives, but I prefer the original term that Mollison suggested. It does not, however, mean communism or redistributing the wealth by any coercive means!  Rather, it refers to reinvesting the surplus yields we get from practicing Earth Care and People Care into more of the same; it can be thought of as the replicative function of the three core ethics, sharing not only produce and other surplus yields, but also newly acquired knowledge and skills. In short, it a mandate to not only to learn Permaculture design principles, but to teach them as well, and to make use of these principles to heal our landscapes (and our planet) and to create new patterns for symbiotic cohabitation with our living planet, rather than parasitic exploitation.

Ecology is, of course, the biological science that lies at the foundation of Permaculture as a practical discipline. In fact "applied ecology" can be thought of as another concise definition of Permaculture design. So understanding ecosystems at all levels--topsoil, biota and their interactions, climate. population dynamics, plants and animals, landscape forms, watersheds, and ecological succession--are all prerequisites of Permaculture. 

Energy the final, equally fundamental basis of Permaculture design; another short definition of Permaculture is "an energy audit," for patterns of energy flow are at the foundation of everything we do in a landscape. Thus, in conceiving of, and laying out a design--whether for a household, a landscape, or a city, Permaculturists first look at energy flow, including seasonal climate patterns based on latitude and altitude, gravitational water flow, slope and solar aspect, human exertion patterns, microclimates, and external influences beyond our control, both natural (e.g. fire vectors) and human (traffic flows, noise, pollution or "invisible structures" such as laws and ordinances, attitudes and behavior of neighbors, etc.)

These four pillars--Epistemology, Ethics, Ecology, and Energy--form the foundation of Permaculture as a design discipline, but also as a way of life, a way of thinking, that could ultimately lead toward our final asymptotic goal as Gaians: to shift our collective gift of human intelligence from its current parasitic and destructive relationship with our living planet to a symbiotic and healing relationship--before it's far too late. May it be so.