Understanding ethics in the application of permaculture

                                                                                         

The permaculture is a thinking tool that helps in designing systems which are highly productive and yet produce less carbon. However their impact could be very pervasive! It can lead not only to ecologically balanced life style, but also transform our perception of the world and radically change our behaviour. It is a means for connecting people more deeply to nature and wisdom and applying that understanding in day-to-day life.

Permaculture discipline is based on practising what ensures endurance of natural systems, establishing effective but simple principles and making their use to mirror what we design, say gardens, buildings, businesses, communities and towns. Permaculture is essentially meant to create beneficial relationships between elements and ensure that system gains energy instead of losing.

Permaculture is a way of designing where you have to make use of nature’s principles as model and bending them to an extent to create fertile, self-reliant landscapes and communities. This is the right definition of permaculture and is most effective and powerful. It can teach all of us to use our hearts for thinking and heads for responding.

Three ethics of permaculture are: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares. They are not exclusive. They are commonalities of world views and different beliefs, hence shared by many across the world. Permaculture makes them explicit by separating them from philosophy and planting them in everyone’s life. This converts thinking into doing and creates radical capacity for social and ecological transformation.

Earth Care: The originators of permaculture, David Homgren and Bill Mollison witnessed devastating effects of European agriculture on fragile ancient Antipodean landscape.

We cannot have horticulture or organic culture and manage landscapes to sustain on their own for decades and consume products of industries which are run with processes that damage ecology. It does not make any sense in creating an organic garden and then using a CO2 guzzling car.

Earth Care involves decisions about our clothes and goods we buy to material used for DIY projects. We can make choices about what we consume and how we conserve. One third of ecological foot print is used for food we eat; growing a small amount of it in a container garden or a city landscape can make some difference and permaculture is all about this difference we make.

People Care: We cannot develop permaculture if people are excluded, uncared for or expendable. People Care means meeting basic needs for food, shelter, healthy social relationships, education and employment. Understanding of power of community is at the core of People Care. Cuba’s post oil urban culture helped by the permaculture designers is a good example of this.


Fair Shares: The last ethic acknowledges that we all have only one earth which has to be shared with every living thing and generations to come. Industrialized North is using resources of 3 earths while the South is languishing in poverty. Fair Shares is acknowledgement of extreme imbalance and a call for limiting consumption of resources in the North. It aspires to design more equitable systems that give due consideration to limited resources of planet and needs of living beings.

About the author:
Visit Common Circle Education for comprehensive permaculture education.

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