SO WHAT IS PERMACULTURE?

Before designing a system, observe what is happening naturally first...

Recognizing sources of energy within your system and utilizing it at optimal times or places or learning to capture future storage.

Quoting a Jamaican friend, Stephen Brooks said at the 2020 Envision Festival, "If you plan right, all you do is sow". Create a system whereby you achieve usable yields for food, medicine, or perhaps artistic supplies.

Set up systems to monitor your efforts and take feedback from the system other contributors or environmental constituents. Other than human beings may have something to teach you too.

Regeneration comes through the active strategy to honor Nature and not bring the design to a place of degenerative extractive practice. Use resources that are renewable and seeks ways to ensure they stay this way.

Creating a system whereby you produce no waste is an important goal. Nature is remarkable at reusing everything. However, also being able to utilize the waste that may be created can be applied to principle 6 as well as recognizing waste systems outside your direct design that may be obtained for your use might apply.

Patterns may be recognized from Principle 1 in the observation for your system design but they may also come from employing imaginative strategies in participation with your local natural environment.

When there's a lot to do (such as tending to a large harvest), think about integrating divisions. As David Holmgren says in the 2002 Permaculture : Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability,

"Many hands make light work".

Small and slow here refers to incremental. Patience. Run fast through an unknown trajectory and you may be more prone to trip. Move through at a cautious pace and navigate zenfully and most productively. Remember, large things fall hard and there is that fable about a turtle winning a race.

Our current economic, and extending to food systems, merit and reward monocultural system design. Often this leads to extraction beyond sustainability meaning long term degradation to the system. We want regeneration and part of that design means we value diversity of what we use and choose to yield.

Principles 11 and 9 can overlap as there is an appreciation for using "edges" and the "marginal" which might include small, often overlooked, details or inputs. Marginals may be considered part of diversity as using edges and marginals may make for unique yields or pathways.

The only things constant in life is change and therefore, we should be prepared for it in that we expect it. When change comes it is not a shock but an interesting surprise that allows us the opportunity to exercise our imagination and revisit, perhaps all the permaculture principles - especially principle 1.