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From Ethics to Principles

Practically Quantum
Sep 7, 2018 · 9 min read

In the last post I introduced the three ethical foundations of the permaculture system Care of the Earth, Care of People and Fair Share. These three ethics map directly onto the intersecting circles of corporate sustainability- environmental, social and economic sustainability. The three ethical foundations are a kind of set of axioms, from which an entire world of principles can be derived, just as theorems can be derived from the founding axioms established in the different branches of mathematics.

The active components of the ethics: care, care and share emphasive attentiveness, intentionality, action, and response, as well as generosity and transactional relations. The subjects of those ethics: earth and people, reflect the unique role of humans as stewards of the environment and intelligent observers, and finally the adjective fair implies a sense of proper proportion, the notion of justice and the need for well-considered temperance.

From this grounding set of ethics, twelve principles for designing sustainable and resilient permaculture systems have been derived. Principles are distinct from ethics in that they provide the foundation for strategic actions. Ethics instead are drawn from moral values, and the principles developed should comply with those ethics. In effect, as one implements the principles into an actionable strategy for a permaculture effort, ethics can be used to evaluate whether or not those actions and their consequences are consistent with the morality expressed through the care, care and share.

So here then are the 12 principles of permaculture — the strategic principles behind such tactical actions like constructing berms and swales, integration of rotational livestock with perennial crops, promotion of biodiversity, and construction of self-sustaining guilds:

  1. Observe and Interact
  2. Catch and Store Energy
  3. Obtain a Yield
  4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback
  5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
  6. Produce No Waste
  7. Design from Patterns to Details
  8. Integrate rather than Segregate
  9. Use Small and Slow Solutions
  10. Use and Value Diversity
  11. Use Edges and Value the Marginal
  12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change

Or pictorially demonstrated:

These 12 principles specifically relate to the design of permaculture systems. Those systems are multifaceted, holistic and “notoriously hard to define” but essentially the goal is to develop agricultural and social systems that “work with, rather than against nature, of protracted and throughtful obersvration rather than protracted and thoughtless labor, and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.” For this reason, proponents of permaculture would eschew management of massive acreages of monocultured corn, soy and wheat, in favor of systems with integrated plants (and/or animals, insects, landscape systems) that can supplement each other’s nutritional and other needs, such as defense against pests, shade, and provision of trace minerals, etc. To help meet this goal, the 12 design principles were developed.

Before taking a deep dive into each of those principles and how they could be applied more widely at the level of engineered and industrial systems in our future posts, each one is briefly described below.

Principle #1: Observe and interact

Engaging with nature to come up with solutions for the provision of the main human needs of food, fiber and energy. In science and engineering this approach is often called biomimetics — the art of mimicking natural patterns and systems. As our tools for characterization and modeling have improved we have been able to learn more and more about the complex interactions and synergies within natural systems, and even still there is much to be learned and to draw from in our own design and engineering projects.

Principle #2: Catch and store energy

The world is dynamic and energy is constantly circulating or radiating in the form of solar, heat fluxes, or pressure differentials (wind). Being savvy to economically harvest that energy and store it for when it is needed is a principle of efficiency and one we see in natural systems (for example, the energy saved in nuts, harvested and stored by squirrels for consumption in the winter). One of the biggest technological trends of the 21st century has been the combination of renewables+storage for grid resilience.

Principle #3: Obtain a yield

Sometimes when adopting new strategies the results can be mixed. It is prudent and necessary to make sure that the yield is consistent with what you were seeking to obtain with that strategy. In the business world, sustainability relates to profit just as much as it does to social and environmental management. Without returning a yield in the financial sense, then it is impossible to keep an endeavor going indefinitely. Likewise any strategies intended to improve social or environmental performance should be monitored to ensure that the desired yield or goals are being met. An example of this latter point can be found in the book Quantified by Joe Whitworth, in which he emphasizes the importance of quantifying the gains and objectives sought from environmental activism in order to make sure those strategies are sound and leading to real improvements.

Principle #4: Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

Permaculture systems are dynamic. Cycles of day and night, season by season, year by year. In the midst of this dynamic activity, there will be interactions and feedback loops operating in time and space. Interactions and feedback that reinforce the goals of yield and biodiversity need to be strengthened, whereas those actions that are operating without restraint and leading to a lack of balance need to be regulated. The same is true for any modern industrial and/or economic system. Self-regulation and feedback is symbolized mathematically by the analysis of systems dynamics (neat video linking chaos theory to feedback loops and regulation is available here).

Principle #5: Use and value renewable resources and services

When talking sustainability, many people will naturally think recycling, and certainly that is a part of renewable resources and services- but renewables also includes resources that can be harvested again and again from nature by working with natural, circular (i.e. periodic) systems. This is why much of the initial emphasis in permaculture was on the use of perennial plantings to provide food, fiber and energy, rather than annuals which require the energy intensive cycles of tilling, planting and harvesting over and over again. Other renewable services related to agricultural production include the encouragement and provision for pollinating insects and birds for managing pests. The intentional selection of the words use and value highlights that not only should we look to leverage renewable resources, but we should properly value them in a quantitative and qualitative sense.

Principle #6: Produce no waste

This permaculture principle is also foundational to the Circular Economy, an economic framework that is now being heavily promoted at local, regional and national levels. The principle here is one of efficiency and requires creativity and thoughtful planning. An important addendum to this principle is the taking of inventory: what goods, services or energies are you bringing into your permaculture design system, and which of those are leaving in the form of waste material or energy? By-product synergy networks are an exciting new development in regional business and industrial communities for finding partners to upcycle materials that would otherwise be considered waste using online Materials Marketplaces.

Principle #7: Design from patterns to details

Patterns indicate natural flow of energy and resources- and, alternately, patterns can be designed to redirect that flow to accomplish goals such as irrigation, energy and/or water storage, or to put different systems into contact with one another to introduce new edges and margins where diverse interactions can take place. Permaculture uses this concept of patterns to design mutually supportive guilds such as spiral gardens, and to catch and store important and often scarce resources such as soil carbon, water and energy. The patterns form the backbone of the designs, with the details filled in as a means for accomplishing those patterns. New engineering tools, such as additive manufacturing, are freeing designers in industry from the constraints of the “details” to explore novel new patterns based on fractals or rib and foam structures to achieve goals such as lightweighting and superior fluid dynamics performance.

Principle #8: Integrate rather than segregate

According to the UK Permaculture Association, “a healthy vibrant ecosystem is a mass of connections and relationships. That’s what we are trying to create with a permaculture system.” To take another quote, this time from Masanobu Fukuoka, “an object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.” We see this principle at work in the modern strategy for designing industrial parks, in which businesses co-locate in regions where resources and by-products can be easily shared and exchanged.

Principle #9: Use small and slow solutions

This principle seems antithetical to the concepts of scale and globalization. The idea here is on improving the effectiveness of outcome and the system resilience by utilizing local, distributed resources (matter and energy), rather than centralizing. Modern resilience theory favors this concept, and, furthermore, we see it at work through the development of smart, decentralized power systems (battery + solar), as well as next-generation concepts such as small modular reactors for nuclear power. The local food movement and urban farming comprise two other examples of this principle at work in the traditional permaculture concept. Staying small and slow allows one to fully enact other principles, such as identifying where self-regulation is necessary, absorbing feedback, and leaving time and space to observe and interact.

Principle #10: Use and value diversity

Diversity is fundamentally empowering as it reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and/or random hazards by creating systems with multiple strengths and response vectors. For example, a garden composed of only a single crop that faces a debilitating threat will have a very hard time recovering, and, will also require the employment of considerable chemical and/or mechanical defenses to have a good chance of survival. On the other hand, integrating different crops, alongside smaller crops that provide complementary strengths, such as defense mechanisms against predators and plants that attract pollinators, will bring about the diversity needed to better withstand those threats. Similarly, in the business and industrial worlds, diversity can enhance resilience in multiple directions as well as promote creativity and opportunities for new interactions.

Principle #11: Use edges and value the marginal

This principle is one of my favorites as it overlaps with my inherent interest in surfaces and interfaces between substances (see my previous Medium post on the Chemical Life of Surfaces). Edges are the place between being and not-being; between forest and meadow, sea and land, earth and sky. Edges (and the margins on either side of those edges) between two habitats or ecosystems provide unique environments that can potentially be more productive and diverse that the habitats themselves. This is because resources can be accessed from both of the habitats in close proximity. Permaculture systems seek to foster edges through techniques such as alley cropping, use of guilds, interplanting and using shapes, contours and hedges. Value the marginal means to look for underutilized opportunities at the boundary spaces. What can you do at a boundary between two systems that would not be possible in either of those systems alone? In the academic world, we call that interdisciplinary thinking, and that is where most of the exciting innovations today are occurring in science and engineering.

Principle #12: Creatively use and respond to change

Change is inevitable. Industrial systems such as factories are typically highly tuned, and therefore change provides a challenge to proper system operation. Permaculture systems, on the other hand, should be accepting of change and feature designs that can turn change to their advantage. In Resilient by Design Professor Joseph Fiksel (Ohio State University) identified four characteristics systems can improve upon to strengthen their resilience to change:

(i) Diversity: existence of multiple forms and behaviors;

(ii) Efficiency: performance with modest resource consumption;

(iii) Adaptability: flexibility to change in response to new pressures;

(iv) Cohesion: existence of unifying forces or linkages

As we have already briefly seen, enacting the prior 11 principles hits on all of these points and thus will lead to systems inherently designed to be robust and resilient in the face of changes.

Wrap Up

Since there is a lot to absorb in these 12 principles, in the following posts, I will go through each one individually and provide examples of how it applies in the traditional permaculture context, and where historical and recent trends in science and engineering can apply these principles in a transformative way that will build a society that can be sustainable and resilient even in the era of change and resource constraints that awaits us in the latter 21st century and beyond.

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