ETHICS
- Earthcare
It is easy for most of us, living seperated from nature, to agree that all life is sacred because we do not have to deal personally with the killing done
- people care
...accepting personally responibility of our situation as far as possible, rather than regarding external forces or influences as controlling our lives.
The fact is that our own comfort is bases on rape of planetary wealth, depriving other people ( and future generations) of their own local resources.
- Fairshare
Learning to see all children, rather than just our own, as our heirs is one of the great challenges of male culture around the world.
1.observe
The thinking and design revolution
...knowledge which people appear to hold has not been integrated with and reinforced by their personal experience.
If energy supply is too great, the system usually dies from self-pollution (in the way yeast cultures dies from its own alcohol waste)
2. Energy
When the earth beneath us is less like a dead concrete slab and more like a dark moist living sponge, then we know we are on the right track
3.Obtain a yield
If we fail to harvest anything that gives us sustenance and enjoyment and buy all our food from the shop, then our permaculturedesignes garden wont last long as a display of ideals.
No-one is more disadvantaged as the poor without the skills (a flexibility and openess to opportunity) of poverty.
On a politicalquestion, studies of development projects in poor countries typically show a (EMERGY) gain to the donor country, a loss to the recipient country and a huge loss to the local area and people who are supposed beneficiaries.
When we become permaculture Jacks-of-all-trades, building houses, gardening and self-reliant, as well as being self-employed and involved in community affairs, we have more chance of developing an intuitive sense of the parterne of resource allocation that work.
Quality if change is traded in for quantity of influence.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
If we get heating at the flick of a switch and dont pay the real cost of power, then the impacts of our choices (such as global warming) become remote and abstract
This the first priority is to survive (obtain a yield through captured energy), while the second is to pay for what we get in some way that helps maintain the future flow of energy. The third, is to contribute in some other way and get direction, to sider system, rather than seeing our own survival as an end in itself.
Rather than a big economic stick to force the majority off the “gravy train” of affluence, we need a change in values and rewards to reinvest in creating livelihoods and lifestyles of husbanding of nature - in other words, we need a Deep cultural revolution that recognises society’s increasing dependence on nature.
We aim to change from dependent consumers of unsustainable producers and services to responsible producers of appropriate wealth and value.
Rapid energy descent means that our individual behaviour today may be more potent in determining the future than the behaviour of whole communities in that future.
Feedback fosters personal responsibility and personal responsibility builds feedback.
Think globally act locally
In the process of empowering ourselves, we contribute to a more balanced and harmonious world capable of continuing to support life.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
Mollisons 5 categories of resources
1. Those which increase with modest use
2. Those unaffected by use
3. Those which degrade if not used
4. Those reduced by use
5. Those which pollute if used.
The image of clean green technology where we do not need to mess with nature or kill anything to provide for our needs is, in the final analysis, an illusion.
We can aspire to redeveloping this resepectful valuing of nature’s gifts. As long as we can live from the oil well and the coalfield, we should do well pay hinanden to them rather than take them for granted like spoiled children who have everything but value nothing.
...previosly functioning and free ecological services are notices when they break down due to overload or abuse. The cost of providing alternatives to these free services highlights the absurdity of the notion if an economy Independent of nature.
This principle reminds us that nature often used apparent wastes to expand and strengthen living systems, which in turn provides people with more resources.
6. Produce no waste
The view of people as consumers and excreters might be biological, but its not ecological.
Bill defines pollutant as “an putput of any system component that is not being used productively in any other component of a system”
The need to buy new clothes, the habit of throwing away half the food on the plate or leaving the lighed on at night so the kids dont get scared are all behaviours which show this pattern of exstravagant consumption to habitual born to addictive necessity. Addiction to wasteful habits is a factor that has been underestimated in driving consumption by the majority and in keeping the disadvantaged poorer than they need to be.
Today, with fuels and non-renewable resources in decline and our renewable resources of souls forests, fisheries and so on in poor state, the imperative has svigtes to increasing efficiency in use of every kilowatt of electricity, tonne of steel, cubic meter of wood or water. At the same time human labour and skill in science, business and technology is abundant.
7. Design from pattern to detail
This bias towards short-term thinking within our own lifetimes has been described as an evolutionary weekness of humans, which we must overvinde if we are to survive.
8. Integrate rather than segregate
Any consideration of how seperate elements work as a part of an integrated system is based on their nature in isolation.
With declining energy, flexibility to changing conditions and needs is more useful than the apparent gains possible from specialisation.
Whether lowtech and socially accessible permaculture models or hightech corporate ways prevail, integration of previously segregated systems appears to be fundemental principle driving post-industrial design.
In nature, systems that are immature and growing rapidly, in a situation of surplus free energy, rend to be dominated by competitive relationships; mature ecosystems, in which little free or surplus energy, show a high degree of mutualistic and symbiotic relationships.
The hope, that in a sustainable future we can continue to live isolated from each other is the social side of the illusion of a sustainable future in a technosphere. The belief that human nature demands that we live segregated and uncooperatice lives is argueably a greater impediment to a sustainable future than the belief that technology and human brilliance can solve environmental problems.
Corporate culture and ecology
To use ecology to describe community requires patience and a whole-hearts acceptabce and embrace of complexity, rather than any illusion that forced simplicites can work.
How we manage and distribute the abundance from the broadacre commons is perhaps the greatest design issue for a society adapting to energy descent.
9. Use small and slow solutions
Live simply so others simply may live.
Lessons of the folly of excessive growth and side (such as “natural” disasters and economic depressions) have not been strong enough to counter the gathering momentum of the “bigger is better” culture.
...we tend to think that people havd always exploited every opportunity for growth in numbers and material wealth and that it was only environmental and external constraints that contained humanity.
The durability and beauty of an item was measured by the quality and the value of production by trade and craftspeople rather than how fast it was produced.
d.16/7
afsluttede bogen i foregårs!
The acceleration in the material world has been small in comparison to the acceleration in information, media and culture...the focus is most on the wonderous increase in speed and capacity of technology but ignored the value of what is communicated and the side-effects of speed. “All show No substance”
Remember the map is not the territory; the virtual world is not reality.
As we accept our own fallibility and mortality and tune in to nature’s patterns, we see that slow and steady wins the race. When an adolscent of immortality and values of speed, novelty and endless growth define a whole civilisation, i think we are close to its demise and the birth of a new cultural paradigm.
10. Use and value diversity
The cultivated system provides high yields, but it dependent on intensive management. On the other hand, the wild ecosystem provides low yields with little or no management other than harvesting.
But breeding without the appropriate context, the aesthetic rules are as meaningless as a European Christmas celebrate in an Australian summer.
Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves whether what we’re doing represents care of Earth and its lifeforms, care of people, distribution of surplus and acceptance of limits.
The diversity of dialects and cultures from one region to another reflected the constantly renewed power of the land as a formative force in human culture.
Morderen global capitalism, driven by fossil-fuel wealth, is consuming human cultural, agricultural and natural diversity and replacing it with global monoculture at all levvels.
Most indiginous people recognize that, if their culture is removed from nature, land, food and other practical expressions, its most valued aspects - language, kinship, spiritual beliefs - become disconnected and eventually a dead tradition.
Without experimentation, we do not know what the possibilities are.
Recognise diversity s a form of abundance to be cherished, while accepting that forces larver than ourselves will be set the limits to that abundance.
11. Use edges and value the marginal
The inspiration, exampled and wisdom for solutions come not from the centre but from the margins, where people live at the ryge between culture and nature, between modernity and the past.
12. Creatively use and respond to change
First is designing to make use of change in a deliberate and co-operative way, and second to creatively respond or adapt to large-scale system change that is beyond our control and influence.
When we intervene in systems over which we have some substantiam design or management influence - gardens, farms, business, family - we can make use of change in ways that reflect our power and relationship to the system.
Permaculture involves the transition from dependent consumer to responsible producer, but it is just as important to acknowledge that it is our energetic creative side trying to control and manipulate nature that is the root of the environmental crisis.
The idea of energy and successional hierarchy flowing from plants to herbivores and on to carnivores is, for many people, a new way thinking about nature. The usual perspective focuses on the active role of animals in consuming food. This perspective is natural enough but misses the point: it is not the acts of eating and living that create food and habitat. These resources are created for animals and humans by the slow processes of plants that appear (superficially) to be doing nothing.
At one level permaculture could be seen as “remedial wholistics” for citizens of affluent countries divorced from nature.
The maxim about the first generation creating wealth, which the second generation spends and the third loses, shows the common understanding of affluence.
In developing a post affluent culture it is not necessary to denigrate what our parents, grandparents or ancestors did as ignorant, shortsighted or anti-nature. Instead we recognise that the ground on which web-standarder has been prepared for js by those who have gone before.
Use of excessive energy to simplify and control the system is the typical solution. Simplification and control might be brief a brief description of what we tend to do in all areas - using natural systems, organising scientific research, managing organisations, and designing our living environment.
Permaculture is a dynamic interplay between two phases: on the one hand, sustaining life within the cycle of seasons, and on the other, conceptual abstraction and emotional intensity of creativity and design. Like the relationship between stability and change. It is the steady cyclical and humble engagement with nature that provides sustenance for the spark of insight and integration which, in turn, informs and transforms the practice. The first is harmonious and enduring; the second is episoder and powerful. The joyful assymmetric balance between the to expresses our humanity.
