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 defense spending that is in small bites, or large catastrophes, eroding life forms everyday or take the path to life and survival.

Information and humanity, science and understanding mainly about what is most distant; astronomy and astrology were our ancient preoccupations. We progressed, millennia by millennia, enumerating the wonders of earth. First by naming things then by categorizing them, and more recently, by deciding how they function and what work they do within, in the development of different sciences, disciplines and technologies; a welter of names and sundering of parts; a proliferation of specialists; and a consequent inability to foresee results or to design integrated systems.

The present great shift in emphasis is on how the parts interact, how they work together with each other and how dissonance or harmony in life systems or society is achieved. Life is co-operative rather than competitive. And life forms of very different qualities may interact beneficially with one another and with their physical environment. Even "The bacteria …live by collaboration, accommodation, exchange and barter."

ETHICS

In earlier days, several of us researched community ethics, as adopted by older religious and co-operative groups, seeking for universal principles to guide our own actions. Although many of these guidelines contained as many as 18 principles, most of these can be included in the three below (and even the second and third arise from the first) :

The Ethical Basis of Permaculture

1. Care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and

multiply.

2. Caring for people: Provision for people to access those resources

necessary to their existence.

3. Setting limits to population and consumption: By governing our

own needs, we can set resources aside to

further the above principles.

This ethic is a very simple statement of guidance, and serves well to illuminate everyday endeavors. It can be coupled to a determination to make our own way – to be neither employers nor employees, landlords nor tenants, but to be self-reliant as individuals and to be co-operative as groups.

For the sake of the earth itself, I evolved a philosophy close to Taoism from many experiences with natural systems. Permaculture is a philosophy of working with rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems and people in all their; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions. A basic question that can be asked in two ways is :

What can I get from this land, or person ? or

What does this person, or land, have to give if I co-operate with them ?

Of these two approaches, the former leads to war and waste, the latter to peace and plenty.

Most conflicts, I find, lay in how such questions are asked, and not in the answers to any questions. Or, to put it another way, we are clearly looking for the right questions rather than for answers. We should be alert to rephrase or refuse the ‘wrong’ questions.

It has become evident that unity in people comes from a common adherence to a set of ethical principles, each of us perhaps going our own way, at our own pace, and within the limits of our resources, yet all leading to the same goals, which in our own case is that of a living, complex and sustainable earth. Those who agree on such ethics, philosophies, and goals, form a global nation.

How do a people evolve an ethic, and why should we bother to do so ?

Humans are thinking beings, with long memories, oral and written records, and the ability to investigate the distant past by applying a variety of techniques from dendrochronology to archaeology, pollen analysis to the geological sciences. It is therefore evident that behaviors in the natural world, which we thought appropriate at one time, later prove to be damaging to our own society in the long-term (e.g. the effects of biocidal pest controls on soils and water).

Those who are led by information, reflection and careful investigation like to moderate, abandon, or forbid certain behaviors and substances that in the long term threaten our own survival.

Conservative and cautious rules of behavior are evolved. This is a rational and sensible process, responsible for many taboos in tribal societies.

From a great many case histories we can list some rules of use, for example the Rule of Necessitous Use – that we leave any natural system alone until we are, of strict necessity, forced to use it. We may then follow up with Rules of Conservative Use – having found it necessary to use a natural resource, we may insist on every attempt to :

In practice, we evolve over time to various forms of accounting for our action. Such accounts are fiscal, social, environmental, aesthetic or energetic in nature, and all are appropriate to our own survival.

Consideration of these rules of necessary and conservative use may lead us, step by step, to the basic realization of our interconnectedness with nature; that we depend on good health in all systems of our survival. Thus, we widen the self-interested idea of human survival (on the basis of past famine and environment disaster) to include the idea of the survival of natural systems, and can see, for example, that when we lose plant and animal species due to our action, we lose many survival opportunities. Our fates are intertwined. This process, or something like it, is common to every group of people who evolve a general earth care ethic.

Having developed an earth care ethic by assessing our best course for survival, we then turn to our relationship with others. Here we observe a general rule of nature : that co-operative species and associations of self-supporting make healthy communities. Such lessons lead us to a sensible resolve to co-operate and take support roles in society, to foster an interdependence, which values the individuals rather than forms of oppositions or competition.

Although initially we can see how helping our family and friends assists us in our own survival, we may evolve the mature ethic that sees all humankind as family, and all life as allied associations. Thus, we expand people care to species care, for all life has common origins. All are ‘our family’.

We see how enlightened self-interest leads us to evolve ethic of sustainable and sensible behavior. These then, are the ethics expressed in permaculture. Having evolved ethics, we can then devise ways to apply them to our lives, economies, gardens, land and nature; this is what this book is about; the mechanisms of mature ethical behavior, or how to act to sustain the earth.

There is more than one way to achieve permanence and stability in land or society. The peasant approach is well described by King for old China. Here people hauled nutrients from canals, cesspits, pathways and forests to an annual grain culture. We could describe this as ‘feudal permanence’ for its methods, period and politics. People were bound to the landscape by unremitting toil, and in service to a state or landlord. This leads eventually to famine and revolution.

A second approach is on permanent pasture of prairie, pampas, and modern western farms, where large holding and few people create vast grazing leases, usually for single species of animal. This is best described as ‘baronial permanence’ with near-regal properties of immense extent, working at the lowest possible level of land use (pasture or cropland is the least productive use of land we can devise). Such systems, once mechanized, destroy whole landscapes and soil complexes. They can then best be typified as agricultural deserts.

Forest not seen by industrial man as anything but wood are another permanent agriculture. But they need generations of care and knowledge, and hence a tribal or communal reverence is only found in stable communities. This then is the communal permanence many of us seek to be able to plant a pecan or citrus when we are old, and to know it will not be cut down by our children.

The further we depart from communal permanence, the greater the risk of tyranny, feudalism, and revolution and the more work for fewer yields. Any error or disturbance can then bring disaster as can a drought year in a desert grain crop or a distant political decision on tariffs.

The real risk is that the needs of those people working ‘on the ground’ i.e. the inhabitants, are overthrown by the needs (or greeds) of commerce and centralized power that the forest is cut for warships or newspaper and we are reduced to serfs in a barren landscape. This has been the fate of peasant Europe, Ireland and much of the Third World.

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