The Permaculture Ethics of Landscape and Culture

(A final paper I originally wrote for my ethics class, December 2007.)

Ten thousand years ago, agricultural society sprang from the Fertile Crescent. Many thinkers (these include Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond, and Daniel Quinn) have argued in recent years that this was one of the most ridiculous pursuits in the history of the human species. I follow their logic, to such an extent that I have formed an understanding of humans essentially inextricable from their surroundings. We humans shape our surroundings but we are nothing if not malleable, and our surroundings influence our ways of living. Our landscape, the place we call home, and our culture are intertwined, and if our culture is based on the merciless destruction of that very landscape, our culture is based on a foundation that is already crumbling, and our culture will soon collapse, as well. If we place the focus not on the terrified response, “How do we save our presiding culture?” but on the question, “What basic tools do we need to move from collapse (of our culture) to a landscape (a place we can call home) that can sustain the presence of so many cultural refugees?” we will be much the better for it. I wish to offer the model of Permaculture in response to this question, with the added reassurance that we certainly have the tools available, we simply need to understand them better.

Care for the earth. Care for the people. Limiting of population and consumption. Further examination of these three principles makes it obvious that an overarching rule can be established, namely that, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now” (Mollison 1). These three principles combined, along with the overarching rule, form the whole of Permaculture ethics, a code established some twenty years ago by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two Australian horticulturists and designers seeking a better model for communities and a framework for sustainability. They established this model in Permaculture, a specialized design system that represents both permanent agriculture and permanent culture by incorporating all the edgiest practices of our time period—ecological landscape design, agro-forestry, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, natural building, alternative economic models (usually localized economies), community building, and non-traditional education—into one field. Mollison and Holmgren grounded their new discipline of Permaculture in a simple code of ethics, which all Permaculture designers now share in common. But what makes these Permaculture ethics, well, ethical? I seek to defend in this essay, along with the conclusion that Permaculture can provide for the refugees of agricultural society where agriculture cannot, the ethical validity of the code of Permaculture ethics, especially as contextualized with other ethical theories and their principles.

Before exalting the merits of Permaculture, we should first consider individually each piece of the code of Permaculture ethics. If the only ethical decision to be made is to take responsibility for our existence and the existence of our children, why do we need the other three principles? Well, on its own, the directive, “take responsibility,” sounds awfully vague to me! Had Mollison and Holmgren stopped after writing down “the only ethical decision” they saw necessary for humans, they would have added nothing to the world in the way of solutions, much less environmental ones. Unless they wrote specific guidelines to sketch out what they meant by “take responsibility,” we might have the absurd case of people running around, monopolizing industrial agriculture, making millions of dollars a year while laying waste to the planet, saying they were taking responsibility for their futures and their children’s futures by securing assets to pay for their needs, and calling themselves “Permaculturists” on top of all that!

Lucky for us they did not do this, and now we understand responsibility to equate with care for the earth, care for the people, and limiting consumption and population. We might even find it advantageous to tack on a few more guidelines, an advantage which we will explore later. Care for the earth, an ethic defined as a “provision for all life systems to continue and multiply,” includes conservation of endangered plant and animal species, careful observation of natural processes, modeling the built human environment after any observed patterns we uncover in this way, and promoting polyculture over monoculture (Mollison 2). Care for the people, an ethic defined as a “provision for people to access those resources necessary to their existence,” manifests in ways such as eradicating the global slave trade, creating self-sufficiency in the community instead of providing the minimum charitable contribution, strengthening communication among individuals and groups so that anyone with new ideas will not be overlooked, and creating community-enriching attractions, such as museums, libraries, free schools, theatres, recreation areas, or restaurants stocked with local produce and goods (Mollison 2). Limiting population and consumption, an ethic that functions in such a way that “by governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles,” comes into play in ways very distinct from the other two ethical guidelines (Mollison 2). It is realized in various instances, from education about fair trade to planning an alternative, un-materialistic holiday, such as a conscientious Christmas celebration, from the choice to live simply to an understanding of populations as a function of food supply. These ethical guidelines work together almost like fairy godmothers, illuminating the types of activity required in taking responsibility for one’s own future and that of one’s children.

The ethical code of Permaculture pertains to the contemporary ethical climate largely in an economical way. Supporting multi-national corporations such as Monsanto, which has a frightening monopoly on genetically modified crops, does not care for the earth, for seed and crop diversity, nor care for the people, for bankrupted small farmers defending themselves in court against Monsanto’s claims of unauthorized use of their patented seed, and doesn’t even limit population and consumption, for as much as Monsanto claims to have answers to nutrition problems across the world, there are healthier answers that do not involve ingesting as yet untested (on humans over time), brand new genetically modified foods, such as corn, tomatoes, soy beans, and potatoes, and that do not create further reliance on insupportable agricultural society. However, supporting a local independent bookstore, for example, can mitigate some of the damaging effects of our run-amuck society. Though local businesses cannot always offer the incredible sales or savings that online stores or big box stores do, they will, in a self-protecting way, invest money in other local businesses, so that each dollar spent there goes even farther in supporting the local economy. Also, local independent businesses have remained human-scale and are therefore less likely to treat customers simply as money-spenders but as unique people worth getting to know. In this way, they will respond to community needs and offer helpful services with ease and efficiency, without having to get approval from an almost endless chain of higher-ups. Most importantly, investing in our local economy overall helps make it our landscape, the place we call home, not just some landscape, some other being’s home.

If we buy all our produce, for example, from companies in California, we are laying waste to our own region. So much gasoline is wasted when items grown on industrial farms in Florida are trucked all the way to California and items grown on industrial farms in California trucked to Florida, big trucking ships passing in the night. It is a food system designed in a completely illogical manner, with industrial agriculture all over the place, even ruining our own region; even if the food we consume doesn’t directly come from the Midwest, something being produced in our region (in Nebraska and Iowa, that would mostly be the corn and soybeans to feed livestock across the country) inevitably has maintained in its essence the rest of the imbalanced structure. When we support small farms in our region, usually these farmers are thinking much farther into the future than those on the industrial farms, and so they are often turning to sustainable agriculture, providing options for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA’s), and forming into cooperatives (this is not confined to the more liberal coastal states, but is happening right here in the breadbasket of America).

Buying local is equivalent, then, not only to care for the people but care for the earth, as well. Local businesses are more likely to strive to improve the ecological health of their surroundings, their region, their landscape. But what about limiting population and consumption? By having to compete in an increasingly outsourced or globalized economy and by thinking of customers as people and not consumers who should “Buy, buy, buy!” local businesses take into consideration the limits of consumption that already exist, whereas the big businesses (which, it might help to point out, might have a headquarters in a place that would make them seem local, but they are not motivated by a devotion to their region) seem to think of growth as unlimited, even though this economic model is “an outmoded and discredited concept” (Mollison 1). Furthermore,

“It is our lives which are being laid to waste. What is worse, it is our children’s world which is being destroyed. It is therefore our only possible decision to withhold all support for destructive systems, and to cease to invest our lives in our own annihilation…Most thinking people would agree that we have arrived at final and irrevocable decisions that will abolish or sustain life on this earth. We can either ignore the madness of uncontrolled industrial growth and defence [sic] spending that is in small bites, or large catastrophes, eroding life forms every day, or take the path to life and survival” (Mollison 1).

In almost every conceivable way, Permaculture offers an ethical solution to the ailments of the economic system of our deluded agricultural society that assumes it can run itself on the resources of the entire world at a rate of exponential growth, which is impossible if we wish not to devour ourselves.

Permaculture ethics have a useful framework to offer as an ecological matter, as well. In our consideration of the ethical benefit Permaculture design provides for ecological problems, we should tack on two additional ethical principles under our umbrella rule of “take responsibility.” These two new principles come from William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things:

1) “Once you understand the destruction taking place, unless you do something to change it, even if you never intended to cause such destruction, you become involved in a strategy of tragedy. You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change” (44).

2) “As long as humans are regarded as ‘bad,’ zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the ‘be less bad’ approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.

“What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?” (67).

With these five ethical guidelines in place (care for the earth, care for the people, limiting population and consumption, a strategy of change, and being 100 percent good), we can observe how these ethics would be ecologically valuable in a city like Omaha, a city that is plagued by its Superfund status from Asarco’s lead contamination. Care for the earth means healing the contamination by removing the lead, the contaminant, while care for the people means making everyone aware of the problem, providing resources to residents in the affected area, evaluating and treating poisoned children, and creating forest gardens, orchards, or community gardens in the treated areas to give the community a vision of hope and sustainability in place of the grim vision of pervasive contamination and ruin. Limiting population and consumption here can be viewed in its alternate phrasing, “Share the abundance,” which means once the contaminated area is healed and planted over with perennial goodness, all the members of the community may take part, sharing in the celebration.

Thus, a strategy of change is the vehicle by which people decide that if poisoning the population didn’t work last year or the year before that and if it won’t work the next year or the year after that, then noticing this pattern and not doing anything about it is the strategy of tragedy and devising a wholly unique, relevant solution is the appropriate thing to do, in this instance, creating orchards and gardens for posterity, as an act of responsibility for the future that we, along with our descendants, will live in. Finally, the ecological applicability of the overarching ethic to “take responsibility” will follow the pattern of being 100 percent good, by not succumbing to the lie that the only thing we can do is curb our ridiculous behavior, to “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but rather by daring to think that we can craft an entirely different future based on good design, that will then prove to be 100 percent good to its very roots. In our Omaha example, this 100 percent goodness would take the form of re-conceptualizing our entire city model and framework and rearranging the elements of the city to work for ecological wellness instead of destruction, to eliminate the need for the “reduce, reuse, recycle” philosophy by eliminating waste from the functional structure of the city.

The other two ways in which Permaculture ethics are extremely useful are cultural and spiritual ways. In the groundbreaking work on child development, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, Jean Leidloff explained much of our agricultural society’s psychological devastation as a function of child-rearing. In an interview, she explained the basis of her antidote:

“The two words that I've arrived at to describe what we all need to feel about ourselves, children and adults, in order to perceive ourselves accurately, are worthy and welcome. If you don't feel worthy and welcome, you really won't know what to do with yourself. You won't know how to behave in a world of other people. You won't think you deserve to get what you need” (Mercogliano).

For me, this approach seems to combine easily with the rule, take responsibility for your existence and your children’s existence. It is much easier to take responsibility for our futures if we stop hitting ourselves over the heads and acknowledge our worth and the necessity for what we have to offer. We can then go out and follow the guidelines of Permaculture ethics from a place of stability, confidence, and ingenuity.

This cultural background is closely linked with a spiritual one. The spiritual stability I think is useful from the vantage point of Permaculture ethics comes from Daniel Quinn’s writings, in which he details the spiritual model of animism as an antidote to dominating and subjugating the earth to agriculture. When we acknowledge the benefits of viewing every element of our planet and everything on our planet as having a spirit, we can not easily maintain a relationship, based on domination, to all those spirits, to the coal and the Redwoods, to the buffalo and the Missouri, to trees or to people. In his collection of animist stories, entitled Tales of Adam, Quinn gifts us with Adam’s insight:

“‘You’re wrong,’ Adam replied. ‘A certain kind of lion would do that, and I would track it down and kill it, because it’s a lion gone mad, a lion that kills whatever it sees, beyond need. It’s thinking: “If I kill everything I see, then the gods will have no power over me and will never be able to say, ‘Today it’s the lion’s turn to go hungry, today it’s the lion’s turn to starve, today it’s the lion’s turn to die.’ I’ll kill everything in the world so that I alone may live. I’ll eat the hare that would have been the fox’s, and the fox will die; I’ll eat the antelope that would have been the wolf’s and the wolf will die; but I will live. I shall decide who eats and who starves, who lives and who dies. In this way, I shall live forever and thwart the gods.” And this madness makes the lion into a murderer of all life’” (13-14).

This theme recurs in Quinn’s work, with the clear analogy running from lion to human (Quinn has written in The Story of B that “We are not humanity,” meaning the whole of humanity cannot be confused for the human victims of agricultural civilization, which he has dubbed Taker culture), the sort of human that lives in agricultural society. Agricultural societies carry with them an Ethos not apparent to anyone in the society, in the form of the concept that humans have the special privilege to decide who (or what) lives and who dies. Quinn’s character, Adam, makes it clear that this is not a workable Ethos. What Adam ultimately implies is that each individual should respect the Law of Life, defined as “how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars,” and not mistake herself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live (Quinn 5-6). The directive of respecting the Law of Life and not intervening with life and death we can therefore append quite smoothly to the initial three ethics of the Permaculture code.

Finally, let us establish a seventh ethical principle in this ethical code. An argument for the essential quality of our evolving universe was put forth in the first of Jason Godesky’s Thirty Theses, a work interwoven with much of the philosophy of the environment I have discussed so far. He writes, “We can suppose another form of consequentialist ethics, like Mill’s Utilitarianism, but with a different measure of ‘good.’ It is not happiness, but diversity that should be our measure. Diversity of life, of thought, of action” (Godesky). The Principle of Utility becomes “The Greatest Diversity Principle” and replaces the old Utilitarian decision-making model. Bill Mollison’s emphasis on polyculture, Daniel Quinn’s emphasis on a multiplicity of tribes (instead of one monster culture, Taker culture), and McDonough and Braungart’s emphasis on a strategy of change, on good design and intentionality, all model themselves after the evolutionary advantage of diversity.

We see how Permaculture ethics match up to Utilitarian ethics, but what of other ethical theories? Certainly, Aristotelian ethics claim that humans have virtue when they flourish from functioning well. Those ethics hinge on the function of man as a rational being. What if we were to revise those ethics to hinge on the function of humankind as an ecological being, to relate to its landscapes in ways that support the ecological balance? That would certainly match up with the Permaculture ethics. Moral relativism flippantly discards any decision-making models other than those established by the individual, whereas Permaculture ethics, though it remains up to the individual to establish her definition of taking responsibility, has a set of guidelines to direct individuals on the ecologically-stable, moral path. Kantian ethics may be too inflexible to have much in common with Permaculture ethics, but one could argue for the directive to “take responsibility” that it is its own categorical imperative. Permaculture ethics are therefore not entirely unprecedented or incomprehensible; they even share certain elements with long-standing ethical theories.

We have seen that in these various contexts of economics, ecology, culture, and spirituality, as well as in the context of other ethical theories, the decision-making rule provided by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren holds true. So now we have one overlaying ethical directive, under which we have the following seven specific ethical principles or guidelines, all closely linked:

Overarching Ethic – The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children’s, which existence is worthy and welcome.

1. Care for the earth.
2. Care for the people.
3. Limiting of population and consumption (Also: Share the abundance).
4. Respect the Law of Life and do not mistake yourself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live.
5. Design and implement a strategy of change if aware of current destruction.
6. Be 100 percent good if desperate for reversal of current processes.
7. The Greatest Diversity Principle: Maximize Diversity and Minimize Homogeneity OVERALL.

With these principles and this ethical code, our over-arching rule has a well-defined context. It becomes possible to apply, without being confused with agriculturalists, industrialists, and economists who see the whole world in terms of commodities that will provide unlimited economic growth, without consequences in the ecological fabric of our landscape, our home-place.

From the work of many visionaries and from the assorted examples presented
here, we start to shape an image of a culture on its last legs, faltering to keep its cultural Ethos hidden from all the humans in its grip (so that they can’t discover the irrationality and un-sustainability of its premise, that humans have the power to decide what should live and what should die). In our examination of Permaculture, we see an alternative, a horticulture-based culture that will be far from the evolutionary ideal but that could probably hold the weight of all the refugees of agricultural-based culture when it collapses. Through Permaculture, perhaps those of us participating in the culture that went so far astray ten thousand years ago can make the first few steps on the way to regrouping ourselves into the tribal configuration that has proven so workable for us throughout the history of our existence. We need only to take responsibility for our existence and that of our children.


Bibliography

Godesky, Jason. "Thesis #1: Diversity is the primary good.." The Anthropik Network. 19 July 2005. The Anthropik Network. 8 Dec 2007 thesis-1-diversity-is-the-primary-good/#>.

Hemenway, Toby. "Is 'Sustainable Agriculture' an Oxymoron?." Toby Hemenway – Ecological Design and Permaculture. May 2006. 1 Dec 2007
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McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st ed. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Mercogliano, Chris. "An Interview with Jean Liedloff." An Interview with Jean Liedloff. Journal for Living. 1 Dec 2007 .

Mollison, Bill. Permaculture: A Designers' Manual. 2nd ed. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1988.

Quinn, Daniel. Tales of Adam. Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2005.