Introduction
The word “sustainability” hardly speaks of greatness, optimal happiness and life enhancement. Sustainable development is becoming synonymous with window dressing and life-support solutions for an unsustainable world. I don’t wish to entirely disparage our past accomplishments, for in many ways the modern world is a great accomplishment, but sober minds will see so many problems that they will not entertain thoughts of salvaging it with a little environmentally or socially inspired tinkering. What’s needed is a radical revision and rebuilding, from the ground up, on principles that lead to sustainability and maximum life-enhancement.
Bill Mollison, the father of permaculture (agroforestry, sustainable agriculture, etc.), once said that permaculture should not only be seen as a method of food production but as a complete culture or value system. This is enticing because, at its heart, permaculture is synonymous with both sustainability and optimization. But beyond the optimization of nature’s ability to support human life, what did Bill Mollison mean? Can we devise an entire culture consistent with the food production principles of permaculture? To my knowledge, before now no one has ever attempted to develop permaculture into a system that integrates other aspects of human life.
To create a complete and consistent “permaculture culture” it is necessary to define the principles of permaculture. I have deduced or defined only four (see below), and have formulated them in language freed of botanical details so that the principles can be applied to aspects of life as diverse as sexual reproduction, literature and home construction.
First, before defining the general principles, let’s consider the specifics of permaculture’s purely food production methods:
The Forest Garden
Design
The organic design the permaculture or forest garden optimizes food production by combining nitrogen fixing with nitrogen depleting plants, combining shade providing with shade needing plants, combining deep root with shallow root plants, combining creeping plants with sturdy, standing plants. It reduces stress and labor because it combines plants that produce all necessary nutrition throughout the year and grows plants that always provide more than one of the following: nutrition, medicine, oxygen, shade, humus, windbreak, soil integrity, building and clothing and burning material, exercise and other functions.
Action
Every plant in the forest garden is there intentionally, not necessarily planted but necessarily tended. The forest garden is intended to fulfill a variety of functions supportive of human needs. Fortunately, machines cannot do the agricultural work for us, because machines cannot function in an organic design. Additionally, delegating labor is unnecessary because there isn’t enough labor to be done to warrant it. Besides, gardening is largely a pleasure and outdoor, physical work is not a cause for shame.
The above description of permaculture contains the following four core principles:
|
The Life-Enhancing Principles
The Principles of Design
1. Diversity
Different but equally good things are selectively combined to optimize the health of the system (ecosystem, nervous system, etc.).
2. Multi-Functionality
Each part in a system has multiple functions.
The Principles of Action
3. Intentionality
All life functions, from birth to death, are natural and spontaneous but are also intentional and generally planned according to natural cycles and needs in order to maximize pleasure and minimize unpleasantness.
4. Engagement
Eating, physical work, dying and all necessary and healthy human functions are enabled, freed from fear, anger, guilt and shame and curbed only by reason; while the life-enhancing gifts of reason, imagination, meditation and humor are fostered and engaged.
|
The Principles Applied
(to the best of my ability)
Using the above four principles, or seeds, I have grown the following theories about nine additional cultural dimensions.
1. The Cob Home
The Principles of Design
A variety of natural materials are used to build the cob home. Though mostly built of a mixture of clay, sand and organic debris, wood is incorporated, largely in the roofing and upright posts. Stones and dyes can be incorporated to help strengthen the base, and pebbles can be embedded in walls for decorative or textual purposes. Plant oils can be used to seal floors and walls. The house is orientated to maximize passive solar heating during the coolest times of the day and year, so that the home can function as a shelter at all times. The roof has multiple purposes: as a means of protection and as a means of catching water for human use. Every room and niche has multiple functions. Additional cob home functions are optimal reductions in risks of death or injury from fires, earthquakes, windstorms and floods.
The Principles of Action
The home is an intentional creation: it is designed to stand for centuries, requires little maintenance and can be built with relatively little effort and knowledge, and no machines. Home building is a pleasant tactile experience and a safe and healthy form of mental and physical exercise even the children can enjoy. With – ideally – the exception of excretion, any biological function can be done in any room. We exempt excretion, not because we dread the prospect of nasty surprises but because we wish to limit disease and think that – due to the valuable plant fertilizing properties of excrement – we might as well evacuate ourselves outdoors, where those valuable properties can be used.
2. The Body
The Principles of Design
The future child’s genetic, biological inheritance is our foremost concern. All biological variations are equal provided no variation impairs normal functioning. Nevertheless, couples are selected with different biological strengths (shallow notions of beauty or wealth not included) in order to provide the child with the best possible genetic inheritance. Diverse factors and functions must be considered, and many compromises made, for no man or woman is perfect, and the community must avoid inbreeding and depleting precious genetic variety. Design actions can include limiting women to a single pregnancy if their first delivery failed or nearly failed and breeding for such genetic benefits as – I might be joking here – that most beneficial gene, the ticklish gene.
The Principles of Action
Reproduction is planned and carefully monitored in order to – as much as possible – prevent unsustainable overpopulation and unnecessary depopulation. Pre-conception forms of birth control are actively practiced. Both reproductive and non-reproductive sex are normalized, freed from shame. Inhabitants who have yet to fulfill their reproductive role are limited to masturbation in order to prevent unplanned children. To further prevent the spread of disease, perhaps no one should be permitted to engage in non-reproductive sexual intercourse with members of separate communities except for planned reproductive purposes.
3. The Community
The Principles of Design
Different age groups co-exist in equality, meaning that neither toddlers nor adults play the dictator. The community has no centralized, hierarchized political structure (design), is composed of males and females (no surprise here), and “biological” families do not form separate units because every adult man and woman functions as a parent to every child and because biological fathers do not live in the same community as their biological children (see genetic wealth, above). All adults function as parents, and no parent specializes in any one parenting function (playing, cleaning, feeding, teaching, etc.), though men should probably not be expected to breastfeed.
The Principles of Action
Parenting can only be an intentional act if it aims to lead children through set stages of both physical and intellectual development. In order to avoid exhaustion and create a true community, all adults are engaged in the responsibility of leading children, while to some extent children of any but the lowest stage of development can help children of lower stages develop. Of course, this assumes that child-rearing is not a shameful or emotionally awkward activity.
(The Five Developmental/Intellectual Categories)
4. Sense and Emotion (1)
The Principles of Design
Oral stimulation for newborns as well as fun for everyone is not subject to the tyranny of the spoken word: it can be non-verbal and tactile. Whistling, clucking, pecking, roaring, etc. are combined, even with speech, to contribute to the amusement and growth of individuals. Facial expressions are likewise freely combined. For newborns, expressions serve to communicate, to exercise (develop motor skills) and vent energy; among older children and adults, childlike expressions can function to communicate, stimulate and amuse.
The Principles of Action
With age and peaking in adulthood, facial expressions and non-verbal sounds become increasingly intentional; that is, they are increasingly intended to please, communicate and/or stimulate growth. Destructive and culturally unsustainable emotions do not dictate the emotive life of individuals.
5. Motion and Speech (2)
The Principles of Design
Movement is not a mechanical activity; freed from self-consciousness and clock-tyranny, individuals can enjoy using their bodies again, making motion playful and dance-like. Speech, too, becomes rich with tonal variations. Children especially delight in the structures provided by songs and dances, structures that combine quite different motions. These motions function to win attention, vent energy, express creativity and develop organizational skills.
The Principles of Action
Okay, I understand that not every adult is keen to sing and dance, but permaculture isn’t looking to build professional choirs and bands. Anyway, so much of our shame is a cultural by-product that prevents adults from effectively teaching and interacting with children. No one will be forced to sing and dance; participation, though universal, must also be voluntary.
6. Plays and Play (3)
The Principles of Design
Pretending and playing do not follow strict schedules and never follow set scripts and rules. Children may compete, but adults function both to facilitate play and to ensure that children never become obsessed with a rule, with winning or getting the most attention. Losing should be even more fun than wining. Roles should be freely exchanged and changed. Rules should be changed and ignored. Adults must be involved, and not only to prevent abuse, bullying and over-competitiveness, but to ensure that playing helps children socialize and exercise, to develop their ability to reason, imagine and feel emotion, and to ensure that everyone has fun.
The Principles of Action
I’ve accidentally covered this category above. My apologies to everyone.
7. Jokes (4)
The Principles of Design
In a world free of taboos, shame and irrational fears, jokes succeed entirely on design principles rather than due to their relation to social codes and mores. Thus, diverse, apparently unrelated words and ideas must be brought together in a way that strongly implies that one or more word gains an atypical, non-denotative meaning, so that the word is really multi-functioning. Any joke in which a part of the human body is said to be something very different, like a vegetable or animal, is a joke on pure design principles. However, the difference must co-exist with some similarity (harmony), as a nose can physically resemble a banana but is certainly not a fruit, while a nose does not resemble a chair, so if it does not function as a chair it could not jokingly be compared to a chair.
The Principles of Action
Whenever anything is intentionally said to be something quite different yet similar, a joke exists. Whenever this structure is marked with anger or used to shame, accuse or anger someone, the joke fails to meet the requirements of permaculture. Joking is fostered in children by adults and practiced by everyone who can.
8. The Arts (Literature) (5)
The Principles of Design
Diverse categories of words are chosen according to the principle of multi-functionality. If a word cannot function as another word, as in metaphorical or symbolical usage, it cannot be used. Exceptions are those words that help other words generate multiple meanings. Words that are quite different, words that carry sexual, elemental and intellectual meanings are combined in the manner that helps meaning proliferate. Reading ceases to be a linear, mechanical exercise; it occurs in organic patterns, with no interest in any result other than the pleasure produced by intellectual word-play.
The Principles of Action
More than ever, words are chosen with care and are read with equal care and intention. No noun or verb is considered read until it has received a minimum of two meanings, each quite different from the other, but related by a non-phonetic similarity. Intellectual word-play marks the intended climax of every inhabitant’s intellectual development and it is practiced by everyone who has reached intellectual maturity. This kind of reading cannot be done with distractions (external or internal), rushed, or immediately after another activity; it is best done with a little planning or thought so that it follows a little meditation and is savoured with a bit of post-reading meditation.
9. Soil – The Liminal Zone
The Principles of Design
Soil is designed by the community, for our dependence on the soil is recognized. Soil quality is maintained by actively mixing it with diverse materials, from wood chips and plant clippings to excrement and the dead. The soil functions to provide plants with minerals, water, and stability, and it provides organisms with some of the same plus oxygen and more.
The Principles of Action
Soil design is accomplished intentionally, and this entails a new intentionality for death. Euthanasia, or intentional death, demonstrates a fearless understanding that life is both temporary and only valuable when free from life-degrading pain and dependence. Additionally, intentional death further optimizes life when it implies a willingness to return the body’s valuable minerals to the soil and the cycles of life. Obviously this is not yet a death for everyone, though in general death is universal.
Concluding Points
Among the benefits of permaculture is that it is accessible to people of all classes because it requires no financing – or none beyond that needed to own the land needed to provide one’s own basic necessities, land which is our greatest right to work and benefit from free of landlords.
Considering how the principles of permaculture can be applied to other dimensions of culture, since permaculture can rehabilitate wasteland, there’s no doubt it can also rehabilitate the millions of people who are emotional salt flats and cacti, void of humor and imagination and unable to reason more than a single step on any matter.
Another accidental benefit of permaculture is that it cannot accommodate mechanization and a division of labor. This is beneficial because, wile permaculture provides higher levels of nutrition, the absence of machines and divisions of labor prevents pollution, environmental degradation, serious injuries, alienation, time wasted in travelling away from home and the tearing apart of the social fabric as people are divided by jobs that monopolize time and require knowledge and skills only a few understand. The permaculture life is free of machines, slaves and labor specialization, not because we are backwards looking Luddites or sentimentalists, but because we look forward to a culture that develops society, the mind and agriculture beyond anything achieved in the past.
Another benefit is the accessibility of all the knowledge required by permaculture. No one needs to study piles of books. Though the permaculture vision of literature my seem like an elitist or even esoteric one, the intellectual freedom it requires is much easier to attain than we imagine, especially if children are never burdened by taboos and the largely useless and even harmful information that flows out of schools and the mass media.
Finally, I consider the absence of belief in immortality a benefit, for it signifies an age that – more than ever – values not only mortal life but the mind’s freedom from paralysis and fear.
