Permaculture Ethics

So me and Jess have kicked off our correspondence Permaculture course this month and our first submission has been sent and returned by Brian our tutor. For the most part there seems to be no fundamental problems with it so i thought i would share with all. Brave of me i know, but it is the essences of Permaculture principle Care of People. Sharing the knowledge. So in glorious technicolour is Permaculture Ethics as submitted by Tim and Jess. (I have also included our tutor's comments in blue)

Permacutlure Ethics

Interview a representative or individual you admire. Do they have a stated ethical basis from which they make decisions? Try to find someone who does. As many people have no formal ethical structure (a mission statement) be sure to give them time to think about their answer if necessary. Ask them about their ethics with respect to:

Care of earth
Care of people
Surplus and Cooperation
Our interviewee for this is Warren, a 51-year old paramedic living in Brighton. He has, for the past 2 years, lived aboard a 35 foot Warrior class sail boat at Brighton Marina. He has been a dive master in Papua New Guinea and Egypt, also running the boats in those locations too. He is a New Zealand national who has lived in the UK for over 20 years. I asked him to describe his overall ethical outlook and whether he had an informal ethical “mission statement”?

“I follow what could be loosely termed a Buddhist principle generally speaking. They seem slightly cliché but are do no harm, minimize my impact and of course reduce, reuse, recycle. Not being the typical recycler I refer more to things like hard wear and clothing. This could be seen more as a necessity though as I live on a 35 foot boat which requires me to consider carefully what resources are available to me, how much I use, what can I store and whether something has a longer “life” then you would normally consider practicable. The primacy of water is hugely apparent when living on a boat, as the amount you store is finite and you can see it reducing as you use it, making you much more sensitive to your use.”

What about an ethical approach as far as it relates to the concept of “Care of Earth”?

“I am fortunate enough to live a reasonable minimalist lifestyle on my boat. The energy requirement on a single person residing on a low energy craft is very little as evidenced by my total energy bill versus yours for a month £6 versus about £40. As mentioned before my water usage is a brilliant illustration of being acutely aware of how much I use. It focuses the attention on whether I need to keep the tap running, how much I use for cooking and is patently clear from my usage that the average usage MUST be too much.

I currently assist my partner with basic animal husbandry. She keeps horses on shared land which I am keen to help her with. Whether it is basic “mucking out” or keeping feet in good conditions, I feel these are good skills to keep fresh. Especially when you consider that the horses are both still competitive.

Growing up in New Zealand, my father taught me to utilize the entire plant when I bought my first house. He didn’t just teach me to sow, reap and eat, he also taught me to use all parts of your crops for fertilizers or compost. I managed to provide a large amount of food from a tiny 40 square metre plot. Sustainability has become a huge focus more recently in my life. I have been a diver in a number of different locations throughout the world and this has exposed me to some of the worst types of damage being done to our oceans ecosystems. Over-fishing, raking of the sea floor, removal of plants from an ecosystem without really understanding the impact that this will have on the overall system has been awful in my experience.
I do encourage people, including my interviewer to consider what they eat especially as it relates to produce from the sea.”

What about an ethical approach as far as it relates to the concept of “Care of People”?

“As the interviewer is acutely aware, I am happy to share my experiences, stories, skills and pit falls with everyone, or at least all who will listen. This, to me, is the key element of care of people as it is important to pass on skills to others through stories, anecdotes or jokes; whatever is the best way to get the idea across. For my part every year I share the “hangi” experience with my English friends. Basically is a Maori barbecue whereby foods is prepared and then placed in the ground along with super-heated stones and covered for a number of hours to cook. But what I hope this shows people is an indigenous technique for collectively preparing and sharing the bounty of the land. It’s fun, active and of course tasty!

As eluded to before I have experience of living in Egypt, around the Red Sea and in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. These experiences have enabled me to see how others live, off of what, and how they share. I continue to share these experiences, try to remember the lessons learnt, the food stuffs tried and cooking methods undertaken.”

Finally, what are your ethics as far as it relates to surplus and cooperation?

“Growing up whatever surplus we had from our allotment was informally shared amongst friends and neighbours or stored, usually by freezing. A lot of the time this was pretty incidental instead of being organised and planned. Shame really as between 20 neighbours or so we could virtually provide everything for each other if we’d planned better. I also brewed my own beer at that time and would ask those that wanted some to provide me with sterilised bottles to help me with production and supply. My capacity was about four dozen quarts to sell at any time along with four dozen quarts in production. It again, was fun as i had lots of people involved in this informal trading scheme whereby no money changed hands but the understanding that existed between us all was of mutual respect and all working towards a common goal. This was a brilliant community-based activity!”

1. Self-Reliance and Community Self-Sufficiency
What skills, resources and abilities contribute to your own you self-reliance? What community building activities can you participate in to increase the level of your community’s self-sufficiency?
Personal self-reliance is not about being able to supply everything you need but to be part of a sustainable system where by using your skills to produce some of what you need and lean on the community for the rest.

This does not simply mean to grow your own food, but growing some of your own food will help reduce the need to rely on supermarkets who use a lot of fuel to produce and ship their goods. For the parts that you can’t produce then look to community markets or eating locally. Continuously learning and updating gardening skills do benefit our self-reliance for example knowledge of composting and water collection assists in teaching how to properly use resources.

Our self-reliance is still in its infancy. We both bring some skills and experiences from our pasts that will enable us to increase our self-reliance but these are by no means complete. One of us spent two years as a volunteer team leader with the Prince’s Trust, recruiting, organising and delivering twelve-week personal development programmes.

This programme required individual and group community projects to be organised, resourced and project-managed by the team leader.

The skills developed in these two years included:
· problem-solving,
· leadership,
· communication,
· motivation,
· cooperation and
· active listening.

These skills are obviously better served to organise, motivate and manage community self-sufficiency rather than show any self-reliance. The other brings generalist Biology skills with a small focus on botany and teaching. From a young age a lot of time was spent on a farm learning to grow our own food and learnt that home grown seemed to taste better. This then led to a 4 year degree in biology and life sciences which gave knowledge of how we could make a difference and to study further how much harm we had already done. (Personal resources)Then completed a 2 year course on secondary education and partook in supply teaching. The skills developed through these courses and teaching is confidence, problem-solving, sharing information, attention to detail and interpersonal skills. (Personal resources)

Politics and economics (an interest and a skill) are fundamental to our understanding of the coming Energy Descent and the need to equip ourselves better with the skills necessary to cope with the urgent changes that are coming. This also helps with education for the community on the importance of self-sufficiency and the necessity of creating a transition plan to better prepare for an uncertain future. Obviously information is slightly abstract, but the combination of our knowledge along with the people skills provided by the Prince’s Trust and teaching will hopefully help in disseminating essential information to our community.

We are exceptionally lucky to have recently acquired a 180 square metre allotment on Whitehawk Hill. This resource will certainly provide us with a blank canvas on which to practice the skills that this course provides, but will also hopefully be bountiful enough to produce a surplus with which to share. Furthermore, this allows us to form better contacts with the local community garden project and Brighton & Hove Transition group.

Our continued participation on this course will provide us with the skills with which to share knowledge and ideas with these other community groups, especially the community garden as they are trialling a small Permaculture plot on their larger community plot.

As evidenced by our above listing of skills, resources and abilities, we, like many are seriously lacking in the kinds of skills needed to properly prepare for a low-energy future. This Permaculture Design Certificate is just the start of a programme of courses to better arm ourselves and aid our community. We further plan to participate on a number of additional courses following the completion, successful or otherwise, of the PDC. So far we are looking at Bee keeping, a short course introduction to this essential skill, this starts in the autumn. After that we hope to participate on an Earthship design and building course to commence in the New Year. These courses are not to be carried out with selfish intentions, we positively intend to pass on these skills to our wider group of friends and neighbours in order to share the wealth of knowledge that these will provide.

Having the fundamental desire to make a positive change in our life and our community’s life is key. Brighton is a hugely diverse and progressive bastion in an otherwise reasonably conservative country. We are lucky in that respect, as it provides no small amount of community, volunteer and green groups with which to assist. Our only concern would be how to choose and prioritise which community groups we can assist. Some of the geographically close groups are listed here with some information on them, but this is by no means exhaustive. I believe by the end of our course we will be able to lend our skills to any number of community groups.

“Brighton Permaculture Trust promotes greener lifestyles and sustainable development through design. It raises awareness and facilitates learning in supportive environments. It is an ethical not-for-profit organisation formed in 2000 by people interested in putting Permaculture ‘on the map’ in Brighton and the Sussex area.” (http://www.brightonpermaculture.co.uk/index.html)

“Transition Brighton & Hove Food Group is working to strengthen the resilience of Brighton & Hove in the production and delivery of food. Their aim is to develop relocalised food infrastructure as well as encouraging individual and community action to grow our own food.”(http://www.transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk/2007/08/food-group.html)

“Moulsecoomb Forest Garden & Wildlife Project was set up with the stated aims of reducing anti social behaviour by involving excluded pupils in the running of the garden; improving the health of the community by offering free, organic and locally grown vegetables to low income families and elderly people; enhancing skills and employability by offering practical based training and volunteer opportunities; getting children involved in planting, growing and eating healthy food and respecting nature and the environment; creating and enhancing wildlife habitats, protecting bio-diversity including old fashioned vegetable varieties; promoting sustainable lifestyles, by encouraging and educating people about composting and the benefits of organic gardening and locally produced food.” (http://www.seedybusiness.org/index.shtml)

As mentioned above these are current groups that are active in our immediate community. This does not mean that we would not be prepared to possibly start our own community gardening or composting scheme. We have enthusiasm, energy and the friend’s network to do anything!

Principles

Interpret your own ethics within the structural principles ‘care of the earth’ and ‘care of people’. Provide examples where possible.
Care of Earth
Our ethical principles are born out of 3 main overall concepts;
· compassion,
· empathy,
· education.

These basic principles allow us to “tread lightly” especially as they relate to Care of Earth. This can be seen in multiple ways care for living soil, biodiversity, stewardship to name a few. We will look at a few that we have dealt with. Care for living soil looks at use of soil and how if overused or if technology used inappropriately can cause loss of the lands ability to support life(a). Jessica’s uncle took over the farm that belonged to her grand-parents, he changed a lot of the ways he managed the land. He started using a method of no till farming. He explained about how this helped prevent erosion and help increase the amount of water the soil can hold as it does not run off. Through her studies she learned about microbes and the part they play in helping plants survive and how degradation of soil through tilling can cause loss of organic matter which holds many nutrients for plant survival. Our care of earth ethics also encourage us to share and educate as best we can.

We have limited space in and around our house to grow any large amount of produce, but we can grow seedlings and bring them on; we can pass these plants on to others to grow in their limited spaces too; we cultivate, bag and share the seeds from our plants whilst encouraging others to do the same with the plants we have shared with them. We try not to preach to others but simply set a good example to follow. This spring a couple, who are mutual friends of us both, were resistant to cultivate a tiny piece of land in their back garden, so we organised a team of people to descend on their home for a couple of hours and transform a simple grassed area into a productive vegetable garden in under two hours. Since we have done this they have both enjoyed the limited bounty of this area and their infant child can also enjoy the area as everything is edible.

Care of biodiversity which includes all diverse life forms that inhabit the earth whether they have a current usefulness to us or not is something we believe strongly in. We believe that it is our responsibility to not destroy other species for our own gain. Jessica’s first experience of this was learned from her grandmother. She would take Jessica to the woods and taught about the things we could use like mushrooms plants etc. When picking these or wild flowers she would never let take all in that area or diminish what was there. She explained that we had to leave some there to reproduce or there would be none for the animals or for us next year. This helped Jessica to have great respect for nature and how we could be a part of it as well as having responsibility to preserve it.

We continuously look at our use of resources, whether that be direct energy costs (we endeavour to switch all sockets off at night and only use lighting in the room you are in; swap all light bulbs to energy efficient; reduce the temperature on the refrigerator and only use the cool cycle on the washing machine) or indirect costs (we often reuse the packaging that can be reused; we recycle all recyclable materials and compost all kitchen waste; we often reject products that use excessive packaging as means of protest).

Care of People

Care of people is an ethic that we think runs through our lives. With a mixed cultural background we expose each other’s friends to different experiences that we have had growing up. Jessica brings her holidays (Thanks Giving, Independence Day) and shares those with our wider circle of friends which is not simply an excuse for a party but also a sharing of time, ideas, meals, traditions and most importantly fun! We often find, but don’t let it dent our enthusiasm, that most are a bit resistant to change and the introduction of new traditions. We are both determined to continue to lean on friends, to continue to expose them to and hopefully gain their acceptance of a more cooperative way of living. We understand that people have busy lives; we understand that people have their own day-to-day problems to deal with; but we still want our friends and community to be aware that their impact whether direct or indirect has a huge impact on the wider earth. Inaction is simply unacceptable and without a helpful, smiling nudge this situation will not change. We use our skills in teaching to share our skills with others so they can use the land and others to help build a community who relies on each other to limit our outputs while making sure none of us go without.

Fair Share

Permaculture looks at combining care of earth and care of people to benefit both or at least be compatible and sustainable. To be able to maintain the earth we need to look at not only how much land is needed to grow our food but also the resources to plant, harvest, prepare and ship those foods; what equipment is used and how much energy went into the manufacture of it etc. We then, ideally, need to minimise our impact whilst minimising the effects the changes have on our lifestyle. It takes research and understanding to know how to minimise impact as it may not be straightforward. For example you can lower your use of energy but if you then use those savings to purchase goods which have high ecological impact the overall ecological impact may be the same or even increased. We will use our knowledge and experience to share and educate our friends, family and community to help reduce our overall ecological impact.

References
(a) Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainabililty – David Holmgren, Holmgren Design Services 2002