What Are Ethics?
What better place to start than to define exactly what ethics are, then we can proceed to look at why we need them, and why they have been incorporated into the ecological design system known as Permaculture.
Ethics is one of those terms that people more-or-less know the meaning of, but can’t exactly define. In common usage, the word “ethics” is often incorrectly used interchangeable with the word “morality”, and though the two concepts are tied together, they are not the same.
So, let’s look at definitions of these two concepts to determine what they’re all about:
- Morals are principles of what is right and wrong
- Ethics are a codified or formalised system of morals of a particular person, group etc.
So, in a nutshell, Ethics can be defined as a set of formalised principles of what is right and wrong conduct.
“Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life, it is bad to damage and destroy life.
Albert Schweitzer
Why Do We Need Ethics?
Why are ethics important? Put simply, they keep people from engaging in conduct that is morally wrong, it’s as simple as that. Without ethical guidelines, an individual may do the wrong thing if they believe it will benefit them and that they can get away with it, without getting caught.
“Ethics is what you do in the dark when no one’s watching.”
Rushworth Kidder (2003), the founder of the Institute of Global Ethics
Systems of ethics can originate from various sources, such as from laws, religions, organisations, ideologies, personal values, and societal values.
The major issue that arises when discussing ethics is the question – what is morally right?
While trying to define what is right and wrong seems to defy some academics and philosophers, who tend to conclude that what is right or wrong is relative and shifts and changes with society’s values, such abstract intellectual posturing serves no purpose in the practical design system of permaculture, which deals with real-life scientifically quantifiable systems.
“Relativity applies to physics, not ethics”
Albert Einstein
There are objective absolute rights and wrongs when dealing with biological systems on a scientific level. This may be a controversial statement to make, but read on and I will explain this further.
The Ethics of Permaculture
As a basic definition, Permaculture is a holistic design system for creating sustainable human settlements and food production systems. It is a movement concerned with sustainable, environmentally sound land use and the building of stable communities, through the harmonious interrelationship of humans, plants, animals and the Earth.
By this very definition, this system necessitates that our conduct is focused on the good of the planet, Nature and the people. It cannot work otherwise.
“A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”
Albert Schweitzer
In Permaculture, we are dealing with scientifically definable and measurable systems, namely biological ecosystems and human communities. What is beneficial or detrimental to either of these systems is not a subjective matter bound to the realms of personal opinion and conjecture. What is good or bad for living systems is objective scientific fact that can be observed, measured and the results readily reproduced, it is not idle philosophy abstracted from reality and relegated to the towers of academia.
“Any living system, when viewed scientifically, has required inputs which sustain life within that system”
Any living system, when viewed scientifically, has required inputs which sustain life within that system. A plant needs sunlight, air, water and soil to sustain it. Naturally, these inputs occur in a clean, unpolluted state. If we negatively impact these inputs in any way, we harm plant life. In the case of animal life (which biologically also includes the human species), damaging the systems that sustain life have a similar detrimental impact, but in a more complex way.
This idea can defined in terms of ethical conduct and summed up in the following definitive statement: If a person’s actions are detrimental to the inputs required to sustain life in a living system, or if the actions are directly harmful to the living system itself, that is, the organisms within it, then it’s unethical, period.
For anyone’s wondering whether eating plants and animals is also tantamount to harming life, there’s a simple answer to that tired old question. It’s a basic axiom of biology, which is the ‘life feeds off life’.
Understanding the Cycle of Life
Plant life is ecologically classified as producers because they are capable of producing their own food through the process of photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, plants utilise sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesise organic compounds, primarily glucose, which serves as their energy source. This ability to convert inorganic substances into organic matter makes plants primary producers in ecosystems.
As primary producers, plants form the base of the food chain, providing energy and nutrients to other organisms in the ecosystem. Herbivores, such as insects, birds, and mammals, feed directly on plants, while carnivores and omnivores consume herbivores or other animals that, in turn, have consumed plants. This forms a trophic pyramid where energy flows from producers to consumers, supporting the entire ecosystem. Organisms that were once living are returned back into the soil by a class of organisms known as decomposers, which release the nutrients to make them available to plants once again. Therefore, plants play a fundamental role in sustaining life on Earth by capturing solar energy and converting it into organic matter, making them crucial for the functioning of ecosystems and the survival of other organisms.
This natural cycle of life, growth, peaking, decline, death and rebirth has been known throughout the ancient world, across all cultures. The early agricultural lifestyle which tied their fate of human communities to the cycle of the seasons of the year, the cultivation of plants and raising of livestock, made the humans of that time acutely aware of the process, but it has been well known and understood long before then.
Necessary and Unnecessary Cessation of Life
When discussing the natural cycles of life, it’s important to make the qualitative distinction between the cessation of life (including plant life) as a consequence of sustaining life, and the pointless, unnecessary destruction of life.
Eating a lettuce to stay alive is understandable, while irresponsibly dumping radioactive mining tailings into a river, causing untold destruction of life, is clearly completely unjustified and unethical! Would living systems be harmed if uranium mining ceased? Likely not, because no living system requires uranium as a primary input for its basic fundamental biological processes. Life existed before uranium was mined, and will continue if it were to stop. It’s essentially a peripheral human activity primarily aimed at deriving financial profit, secondarily as a means of providing materials for creating weapons of mass destruction and for energy generation, the absolute necessity both of which is questionable…
There is a stark and glaring difference between the taking of life to sustain other life, and the taking of life to support a lifestyle!
Actions, whether ethical or unethical, can also be a matter of degrees, there is a quantitative difference between what is sustainable and what is destructive folly.
A case in point is the harvesting of trees. It’s possible to sustainably harvest timber to construct a shelter. which is one of our basic human needs as a species. The key word here is sustainably – we can select what we take, where we take it from, how much we take, as well as choose to use the resources responsibly.
Conversely, we can take a more destructive approach, where forests are clear-felled for food production, or even worse, wood chips for paper and carboard manufacture. This can lead to the disruption the natural tree systems which precipitate rainfall, and the loss of groundcover vegetations may trigger soil erosion, and the rise of salinity due to deforestation. Ultimately, these actions may create conditions where there is inadequate rainfall for agriculture, rendering soil unusable or prone to erosion.
From a Permaculture perspective, ethical actions are simply those that support life, and unethical ones are ones that harm or destroy life needlessly.
Permaculture therefore starts with ethics, which form the very foundations of this design system, and all actions we undertake in Permaculture activities are strictly always in agreement with the ethics of Permaculture.
“Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. “
Albert Schweitzer
The Three Ethical Principles of Permaculture
There are three ethical principles in Permaculture, and these are:
- Care of the Earth
- Care of People
- Return of surplus to Earth and people (also called “Fair Share”)
Let’s look at each of these ethical principles in turn to better understand their purpose.
Permaculture Ethical Principle One – Care of the Earth
The Earth is the life-support system that sustains us, it provides us with all our essential needs to stay alive – air, water, food, shelter. It’s also the only source of these essentials, as we can’t obtain them from anywhere else! Our own bodies are composed of materials derived from the Earth. We totally depend on the Earth, and all the living systems with it (which, incidentally, are all interconnected in a complicated, interdependent web of life) for our survival.
Taking care of the Earth’s systems which keep us alive can logically be perceived as ‘enlightened self-interest’, doing what is right to ensure our own survival – not polluting the air we breathe, poisoning the water we drink, and destroying the land which provides our sustenance.
The principle of “Care of the Earth” includes all living and non-living things, such as animals and plants, as well as land, water and air. Why? As science shows us through the disciplines of ecology and biology, all living and non-living systems are interconnected and interdependent. When one is affected, all are affected.
Caring for the Earth also means caring for the soil. Life is dependent in life, and the soil itself is actually is a very complex living ecosystem which supports plant life. Plant life in turn supports higher organisms and provide us with our sources of food, directly or indirectly.
Beyond food production, caring for the Earth means caring for our forests, which are the lungs of the planet, ensuring a supply of clean air. Forests are also inextricably linked into the process of rain formation and the water cycle, and therefore play a key role in ensuring our supply of fresh water. It means caring for our rivers, which are the veins of our planet, circulating the water which all life depends on.
Permaculture Ethical Principle Two – Care of People
All living things are interdependent on each other, including people in human societies. As the saying goes, “no man is an island”. Humans by their very nature are communal and social animals, much like bees and life on the planet is generally cooperative in nature.
If you doubt the veracity of this statement, then cast your mind back past the psychologically delusional industrialised society that we find ourselves in, and look into our history. Traditionally, the punishment for serious wrongdoers in ancient societies was banishment or exile, being forced out of the community to fend for oneself. This was equivalent to a death sentence, or at least a cruel, lonely and unsafe life of severe hardship.
Beyond physical interdependency, humans psychologically need community. Modern studies have shown that having a sense of community is beneficial to the mental health of an individual, and lack of community is clearly detrimental. The ancients knew that humans needed community, hence the nature of the punishment. It’s a pity that modern society forgets this fact today, and individuals self-banish themselves to an isolated and meaningless technological prison they call modern life, where they selfishly pursue their needs and often never get to know their own neighbours.
Self-sufficiency is a myth, and a harmful one too!
The principle of “Care of People” is about promoting self-reliance and responsibility towards the greater community. It is importance to point out that we are talking about self-reliance and not self-sufficiency here. As mentioned earlier, “no man is an island”, an individual cannot do everything, and it’s ridiculous to expect any one person to do so in any form of lifestyle other than the most primitive. Self-sufficiency is a myth, and a harmful one too! As Bill Mollison once stated, “I might grow food, but I don’t want to have to make my own shoes, though I can trade food I’ve grown with someone who makes shoes…”. That’s the essence of community, it’s all about sharing and supporting each other.
Self-reliance is about taking responsibility for more than one’s own future, and looking to help one’s community by sharing knowledge and experience, to skill people up so that they can provide for some of their basic needs. The essence of this is captured by the expression “give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for ever”. It’s all about a collaborative effort to bring change to one’s own life and that of others.
When people collaborate to support each other, and to meet their needs, both physical and non-physical, this creates healthy human relationships and a bond which builds stable, supportive, and emotionally healthy communities which prosper.
The ethical principle “Care of People” importantly has to begin with the person closest to us, which is ourself! It’s hard to care for others when we can’t care for ourselves, and there’s no point in caring for others while neglecting oneself. Such martyrdom is unconstructive, because if we are interested in helping others, then it is in our best interests that we are in an optimum state to be the most helpful to others. Beyond our individual selves, “Care for People” then extends to the next closest circle of people in our lives, our families, then our neighbours, our local community and then the greater community, and ultimately, all of humanity.
Permaculture Ethical Principle Three – Fair Share
This is also described as the ethical principle of “Return of surplus to Earth and people”.
No matter how we look at it, the world’s resources are definitely finite, so it follows logically that there is a finite and measurable share of resources available to each person on the planet to support them.
If all the resources produced were a metaphorical ‘pie’, and each person has their respective slice of the pie, what happens when someone wants more than their fair share, wanting more than one slice of the pie? Quite obviously, someone else misses out.
Our Western society is driven by the unsustainable economic ideology of consumer capitalism, which incessantly chants the mantra of “continuous growth”, which in effect, implies continuously increasing consumption. This is a rather quaint concept, as the idea of continuous growth in a finite system clearly defies the laws of physics, and also contravenes the laws of common sense.
It is a truly delusional and flawed ideology, as it has no basis in ecology or any other science. If anyone for even the briefest moment stops to think of how we could possibly have continuous growth, and for that matter, continuously increasing consumption, on a planet of fixed size with finite (and diminishing) resources, then the nonsensical nature of this concept is clearly evident.
All our basic needs are met by the Earth herself, and our next higher needs are met through community with each other.
What we fail to see through the hypnotic daze of non-stop shopping, wide screen televisions and a myriad of electronic consumer gadgets is that Nature keeps us alive for free, as she has since we first walked the Earth! All our basic needs are met by the Earth herself, and our next higher needs are met through community with each other.
It’s only in this 200-year-old experiment we call ‘industrialised society’ that we have become disconnected from Nature, and forgotten how to tend to our own needs through the resources provided to us freely by Nature. Admittedly, a life sustained directly by Nature is much simpler and more fuss-free, and sometimes a bit harder, though in a different way. This is probably why many people are opting to move out of the big cities, leaving the rat-race far behind them, and taking residence in the country to lead a more balanced and harmonious life.
When we live closer to Nature, we more clearly recognise and understand that Nature does indeed provides us with what we need, as long as we respect Nature and only take what we need to survive. In traditional societies, hunters knew about the need for sustainable harvests. They would only hunt what game they required to feed their tribes. They were aware that if they took too much of the game animals in a single season, they wouldn’t be able to use all the food, which would clearly be wasteful, and if hunting activities significantly reduced numbers, the animal populations wouldn’t be able to breed fast enough to restore their numbers, and the tribe would potentially face the risk of starvation at some future point in time.
As an example to demonstrate this idea, consider a village with an orchard of fruit trees. In this first scenario, the villagers collectively enjoy the plentiful fruit yield, freely harvesting what they need each day. Nature provides abundantly without cost.
Now, imagine one villager’s greed leads them to hoard all the fruit, taking more than can be used personally, and demanding personal possessions from others in exchange for fruit. This parallels the consumer capitalist model, where one individual’s self-interest disrupts fair distribution.
Both scenarios have the same quantity of resources, but differ in their distribution. The second exemplifies the imbalance created by selfishness. It underscores the importance of a fair share system and highlights the flaws in our current societal structure.
If we move past the irrational fixation on accumulating possessions, epitomized by the empty philosophy of “the one with the most toys at the end wins,” and the resulting frenzy of resource acquisition, we can take responsibility for our lifetime resource consumption. By living sustainably, we can prevent the destruction of the Earth’s vital ecosystems that support life. This mentality of exploitation is not normal, it is learned rather than inherent, and as such, it can be unlearned.
Furthermore, when we share our surplus produce, our skills, knowledge and experience, these actions build bonds between people which all works to foster a sense of stable, collaborative community.
The point of “Fair Share” principle is that if we take only our fair share, then there is enough for everybody, and there will continue to be in the future too.
Permaculture Ethics, Guiding Principles for Purposeful Living
The three ethical principles of Permaculture—Care of the Earth, Care of People, and Sharing of Surplus—promote a life-affirming system that fosters reverence for all life on the planet.
By embodying and living these principles, we ensure the continued survival of our species, maintain the health of the planet, and uphold a profound respect for life itself.
Consider the impact of lacking sound ethical principles: in a world driven by financial incentives where ethics are sidelined, the consequences are both predictable and unavoidable. Global consumption statistics vividly illustrate the inequality in resource distribution, the excessive waste in developed countries, and the unsustainable rates of resource and energy consumption.
The Permaculture ethics urge us to take personal responsibility for our actions. We can either contribute to the problem or be part of the solution—the choice is ours!
Great explanation and I couldn’t agree more. Thanks
I Bongo Guma Ruhinda choose to be part of the solution.
My mission is to train and qualify to adopt Pamaculture.
Thank you so much for doing this blog, I am learning so much and starting to truly understand and appreciate my surroundings. I will be passing this on to anyone who wants to learn about it and hope to radically change at least half of our garden to it’s full potential (due to complicated circumstances I only have half the garden to play with, but luckily it’s fairly big). Thank you!
“Our Western society is driven by the unsustainable economic ideology of Consumer Capitalism, which incessantly chants the mantra of continuous growth, which in effect, implies continuously increasing consumption.”
When sin expresses itself like the way the author described and in the form of GREED is good culture, humanity is crippled, and all other forms of life suffer tremendously. People expect the earth to serve their own selfish and unsustainable interests, and they will reap what they sow … <edited>
“Permaculture” is really about urging each of us to return to the original design and purpose for life God meant it to be from the very beginning when He created all things … <edited>.
Humanity is heading toward mass destruction through their false hopes, wrong philosophies and poorly understood and carried out ethics… <edited>
<please note – unrelated subject matter been edited out to keep it on topic>
Our ethical systems may arise from many different world views and perspectives, religious or secular. All positive, life-affirming views, philosophies, religions and spiritual systems that respect living things and have a reverence for Nature fit in well with Permaculture.
Just awesome, one of the best articles I have read all year, this needs to be in public schools, above mantles in homes an so on, it reflects
and mirrors my beliefs and values perfectly. Namaste Love and Light 🙂
Thank you for taking the time to write this information and share your knowledge with those who are interested in learning. I have been gardening for 25 years now and have always been an organic gardener and over the last few years I have been searching/reading material about permaculture and also aqua phonic gardening – I find myself reading your information each night and being inspired to now include some fruit/berries into my veggie gardens. I will start by transplanting a couple of dwarf varieties and see how I go.
Thank you
Thank you for creating your website. Just wished to say that I commend and appreciate the effort you’ve taken. Am only a few pages in and wish to read everything! Have been on an increasingly environmentally friendly journey since – moreso since attending some Beyond Gardens events + avidly reading Jackie French’s books whilst trying to decide + progress on less lawn and more dedicated fruit + vege garden layout. It all takes me back to Tom + Kit’s garden through the small gate in my back fence – it was a secret wonderland with so much growing and somehow Tom would always catch me snacking on a snowpea :o) So this is fabulous and wished to encourage you to keep on keeping on.
Thanks
Simone (Perth)
Brilliant post. Thanks for this. There is a lot of excellent info in this piece. That is perhaps one of the best pieces I’ve read explaining the ethics of permaculture. Now that I understand them, to be fair, these ethics are also ethics of a lot of religions, spiritual paths and ideologies, not just permaculture. But permaculture is a “way” or “system” of putting them into practice.
I agree with most of it, save for one point – the idea that ‘greed’ is a learned behavior. If you offer a pile of fruit to a group of apes, you will see that some dominant animals will hoard more fruit than they need… just as humans do. Humans come by their behavior very naturally, because they are, after all, animals like any other. Greed is instinctive. It has to counterbalanced by learned behavior, and by other instincts (altruism, for example). There will always be some individuals with disproportionately strong instincts in some areas, who cannot learn to control their instincts. So, those people have to be acknowledged, accounted for, and compensated for… without making them feel as though they were ‘born bad.’
In compensating for these variations in human nature, we run the risk of falling back on authoritarian solutions; rules, laws, regulations. This can lead to a reduction in essential freedoms in society in general, and wind up restricting or even harming those who were never its targets in the first place.
If you can think of a workable solution to this, you will be a genius, indeed.
You might be surprised that recent research in primate ethology by primatologist Frans de Waal seems to conclude that monkeys have a dislike of inequality, the act of equally sharing of food strengthens the cohesion of their groups and their behaviour isn’t driven by greed, but quite the opposite! (Reference: van Wolkenten, M., Brosnan, S., de Waal, F. (2007). Inequity responses of monkeys modified by effort. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(47), 18854-18859.)
Humans can act from their lower nature and be controlled by their base impulses and desires, or they can let their higher faculties guide their conduct. Our commonly agreed and shared values are the foundations of our ethical systems, and without values, ethical systems have no logical basis! This is fine for the Permaculture community, we all agree on the value of people, the planet, community and cooperation, so we can agree on the three ethical principles discussed here.
Unfortunately, most of the modern western world doesnt know what it values anymore, or even agrees if anything actually has any real value! That should explain some of the mess the western world finds itself in right now. How did this disaster come about? Regrettably, during the inappropriately named ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in the late 17th & 18th century, our intellectually vain western society decided to abandon values as the basis of ethical systems and attempted to replace them with ‘reason’, hence the Age of Reason, an idea which grew out of separating church and state and this was one of the biggest failures of that period. Its no surprise that with no common shared values, ethics had no basis, no foundations, like castle floating in the sky, which ultimately collapsed! With no basis for ethics, only the agreed lowest common denominator of rules, regulations and laws enforced by the state are left to coerce the populace into maintaining social order. The result is a purposeless, meaningless nihilistic wasteland which we find ourselves in today, and that void in the lives of modern westerners is something that cannot be filled with the empty materialistic offerings they have available to them. They are deceived into believing that they can fill the void with incessant consumption, but somehow they are still left feeling empty. The use of the term enlightenment to describe that historical period by the west seems presumptuous in this context. So, thats the bed that western society has made for itself, now they have to sleep in it.
Aren’t we all glad we have the permaculture ethical principles as guidelines! I know I am!
One can be for skepticism, reason, separation of church of state and still have ethics. I very much agree with and try to practice permaculture, including the “culture” part. Permaculture uses science with provable results, that provides very clear expectations of ethics. The majority of government and organized religion is very corrupt. I am very glad their powers are not combined to push their agenda/superstition on me! For example, trying to pass off intelligent design in a science classroom.
Also, I just wanted to say that I really enjoy this blog and I am going to share this article with some of my friends. I just bristled at the implication that society needs religion enforced by a government to have common ethics. Those institutions often try impose ridiculous and frivolous restrictions on people in the name good for everyone. There are common ethical values worldwide by humans, no matter under what government or religion they have to be universal, such as the importance of family.
Thanks for your comments Laura.
Traditionally religion served many purposes, some very pragmatic and practical such as providing society with a common set of values and a code of conduct so people worked towards the same goals and conducted themselves in ways that benefited the greater good of the collective. This is something completely distinct and different to the aspect of religions concerned with cosmogenesis (creation and evolution of the universe) and theology (the study of the nature of God and religious belief).
By defining the boundaries of human conduct, above which resided the highest of human virtues and below, the behaviours which were deemed unacceptable (and often punishable), expectations were clearly set as a means of regulating the destructive extremes of human individual behaviour and encouraging positive constructive behaviour for the purpose of social cohesion and harmony. In the past, societies that worked together and supported each other thrived, those that were torn apart internally perished. Hence the universality of religions across all cultures and historical periods. Religions have survived the test of time because they worked in this respect, as have ancient eastern philosophies such as Confucianism (which is not a religion) whose influence has spread right through Asia and is an integral part of Asian culture to this day.
In the modern world this function of social cohesion is now the responsibility of the government, which only defines the lowest common denominator of behaviour, that is enforced through its monopoly on coercion. Cross the line and you will be deprived of your possessions or your freedom, possibly your life. We call it ‘law and order’ these days. The government does not legally define an upper boundary of human conduct above which is desirable, virtuous or commendable, as it’s not the concern of secular governments.
The interesting thing about human nature is that it can be driven by the highest and noblest ideals or the lowest and most debased desires, and actions arising from either or anything in the continuum between the two can and has been justified using reasons religious or secular, as history has shown.
The Permaculture ethics do not dwell on our differences in belief, but focus our common values as human beings.
Do we value ourselves (and by extension our partners, children, families, relatives, friends, community, other people)?
Do we value the planet that keeps us all alive and is essentially our shared, collective life support system?
Do we have a sense of fairness about what we take and use, and regard for others in terms of what that we share or leave for them (present and future generations)?
These are the questions the Permaculture ethical principles ask us, and if we can answer “YES” to all three then we do have a belief system that is at its very core and essence life-affirming. If we conduct ourselves by these ethical principles, then our actions are also life-affirming and will make a difference in the present and for generations of humans to come.
Stumbled upon your website after watching your video with Geoff. You mirror my thoughts exactly on the state of affairs on this planet. I can tell you’ve done your research 🙂
Your article is one of the best examples of what is wrong with modern western civilization.
I believe the positive return to balance on this planet is Permaculture and a home economy. We must stop being materialistic consumers and start becoming producers again.
There is no us and them there is only WE!
I will greatly enjoy reading and sharing your website you are a blessing to humanity.
Peace and blessings….
A good ethics could use a hymn (or a few hymns) to reinforce important points. I propose that a song by Eric Bogle be one of those hymns. It speaks to the ethical point “Care for the Earth.” I quote some lines from the second verse of the “hymn” as a fair-use sample:
“You can plant two strong young trees for every one youve taken
You can make and keep a pledge for every one youve broken
Or let your indifference make you blind, let your greed guide your hand
You can care just for yourself, or you can care for the land”
The full lyrics can be read on Eric’s website: http://ericbogle.net/lyrics/lyricspdf/carefortheland.pdf
It can be heard on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jTdQ2mgLhI
I appreciate the inclusion of ethics as central to permaculture. Ethics as an integral part of endeavors seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit. Not all presentations of permaculture keep ethics so clearly front and center, as this course does. Thank you.
You’re welcome! Thanks for your comments, so true, ethics are one of the key foundation of the practice of Permaculture.
nice article . it touched my heart
Wonderful explanation of Permaculture Ethics, Does social media and technology part of fair share.
Hi John, the ‘fair share’ principle is as much about sharing knowledge and experience as well as surplus harvest, and is an important part of community building. Sharing your experience empowers people. Technology and social media can be used for the purpose of empowering people, that’s what this whole web site and my Facebook page are all about!
There are a few other ways we can share our knowledge, skills and experience:
Volunteering on community projects
Writing articles for newsletters, magazines
Running workshops and presentations
Creating Websites that provide free information
Wonderful
I live on ten acres and have grown food and flowers for twenty-five years. The curious aspect of permaculture/no-dig gardening for me is that I have SO much land! I am changing direction in part by establishing “no dig” beds on a site that overgrew with tall weeds every Summer which is right out my back door. I appreciate learning about the natural value of soil structure and how much is disrupted and destroyed when we dig up and till the soil.
thanks for your blog, you are recommended reading for a free online university of Oregon short course on Permaculture. so i need to pick on bits of what you wrote. you wrote something like earth’s resources are finite, which is totally untrue. the earth system is a self-sustaining system, it recycles woods into soils so things grow again (that’s a perpetual grow system, which you asked about: the earth system) the earth system is a perpetual system. the thing that is finite is land for us, more might be created, but we are rapidly destroying it and overpopulating it, and the system takes more time than what we have given it (‘it’ not ‘she’, that’s how you create stereotypes or the new normal, the earth doesn’t have a sex, if it did it would be a true hermaphrodite) to regenerate. This aint no Dr Who. and then you went on about enjoying the resources earth gives for free, it’s not free, it comes with a return, which is essential. it’s the opposite to disposable.
What is more, you spoke of normality for humans as being something they are not doing now: over consuming instead of the normal consuming less or just adequate: fair share. i have an issue with this. you say, or imply, that there is firstly, such a thing as normal, and secondly you argue from that with a conclusion that humans in their non irrational ie sane state their life would be more full. yes, our way of consumption is ruining the planet we need to change our consumption habits into something like fairshare of renewables.
and i like the way you give us hope that we can unlearn. We have to break an addiction
there is also a few errors with your typing: than instead of then, ‘we’ without reason and something else i can’t quite remember
Thanks for the feedback, I’ve made corrections to the typos in the article, and I’ll answer your questions with follow up articles that explore Permaculture’s ethical principles much deeper.
Hi – I see this as a well intentioned article and I broadly agree with your intentions (there are still some typos as of 21-02-2019 but, for an article that purports to be about ethics, you do sidestep the issue of ethics to a large extent. For example – ethics, and the substance and basis of ethical thinking which could be defined as, how we make decisions when we have no obvious outside help available to us – necessarily is philosophical in its grounding: ethics is part of philosophy. So you shouldn’t then in the next paragraph get annoyed with “idle philosophy abstracted from reality” and philosophers whose “abstract intellectual posturing” leads them to “conclude that what is right or wrong shifts and changes with society” and plead recourse to *real-life scientifically quantifiable systems* for your truth.
By doing this you are simply jumping ship – “real-life” and “scientifically” and “quantifiable” are all open to philosophical questioning. Again, for example, that something shifts and changes with society is not necessarily a bad thing or a reason to reject it – and btw, a belief in the veracity of quantifiable science is also subject to this same accusation, not to mention your belief that living systems can be viewed as simple functions with mechanical input and output – and science in general, especially quantifiable science, is notoriously liable to all sorts of philosophical inconsistencies. But this isn’t the point – if you want to talk about the scientific basis of permaculture, fine – but why label your essay as a discussion of ethics – which is grounded at a deeper level (science requires an ethical basis, ethics does not require science) than science?
There are then inconsistencies in your promotion of *life* as an ethical foundation which, especially if we’re discussing ethics, should at least be addressed however old and tired they may be.
“If peoples actions are detrimental to the inputs required to sustain life in a living system, or if the actions are directly harmful to the living system itself, that is, the organisms within it, then its unethical, period”. OK, so are doctors acting unethically when they kill off a virus or bacterial infection? If you’re saying, the bacteria are interfereing with the biological system, lets wonder what the bacteria have to say about that, and there’s a lot more of them than us – one life form, one vote, kind of thing. Which leads us into anthropocentric versus biocentric arguments, which is where the majority of environmental ethical discussion has been since our friend Arne Naess kicked off the ball with his Deep Ecology back in ’76 – though of course, these discussions have been going on since long before his time too.
The reason I write is not to discourage you but rather to encourage critical thinking on this very important issue. We all have seen how Deep Ecology and environmental “-ism” in general suffered and essentially died at the hands of its detractors and this job was made easier by its lack of rigorous philosophical grounding. Perhaps all arguments are liable to being blown out of the water and we should, as you say, just get on with it – that’s certainly what I’m doing, as I write to you from my infant organic farm in northern Argentina – but it would be really great to see some good, watertight reasons come out of the permaculture movement – our latest expression of people’s love of life and our beautiful green planet, – rather than seeing it all shot down in flames again by paid-for lawyers in the environmental courts.
Om-shanti
Guy
Hi Guy, thanks for your comments and the notification that there were typos in my article, it’s been proof-read ten years later and I reckon I’ve corrected all the typos my spell-checker missed!
To answer your first question, I did a double major in the biomedical sciences at university at one of the recognized institutions here in Australia and also studied Western philosophy (highly presumptuous to refer to it as simply ‘philosophy’ a very first-world-western-centric idea) in my first year. I found Western philosophy deeply disappointing, it had very little to offer in terms of practicality in my opinion. From what I saw it took basic concepts which were common knowledge, obfuscated them in intellectual terminology and jargon, engaged in some mental gymnastics and semantic somersaults, only to land in an inconclusive heap back where we started with no greater insights than a person off the street would have, thinking for the sake of thinking as I would put it. Much like the renowned environmental activist Vandana Shiva who I saw in a presentation years ago concluded about her academic life (studying the philosophy of physics in respect to quantum physics – it was great academic mental exercise but ultimately amounted to nothing. I know some would strongly disagree with me, I encourage people to find their own truth, and that was the second disappointment for me – the inability of a majority of philosophy students (which I encountered) to engage in original critical thinking and logically consistent thought.They seemed to like to memorize standard arguments and agree with whatever position the lecturer presented, changing positions in the blink of an eye when the lecturer presented the counter-argument, without any cognitive dissonance whatsoever. From the psychology I studied, I’d day there wasn’t much analytical or critical thinking going on, just what the cognitive psychologist Piaget would term ‘accommodation’…
Looking at the history of Western philosophy was quite interesting, as A.N Whitehead, mathematician and a philosopher claimed, “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.” Somewhere in the progression from classical to modern Western philosophy, one can’t help but feel that someone threw the baby out with the bathwater, as discussed in the book “After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory” by Alasdair MacIntyre, whose book is recognized as one of the most important 20th century works of Western moral and political philosophy. I see the value of the works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle incidentally, they laid down the foundations for western thought. We can endlessly philosophize about everything, including science, logic, reason, but to what end? It may be great if you’re a philosopher paid to publish papers, not so great if you’re needing to grow food to survive. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs plays out critically here.
Exploring Eastern philosophy was quite enlightening for me, I found it was more grounded in the practical application of keeping large and complex societies running, and the theory was translated into personal practice widespread through all strata of society as a practical guideline to day-to-day living, not the exclusive playground of an academic minority or lawmakers. I’m of the opinion that it has a lot more to offer in practical terms, but that’s just my worldview, each to their own.
In this article, I’m exploring the fact that what differentiates permaculture from other applied sciences is that it has three guiding ethical principles to direct all actions. Does science need ethics? Any sane person would say yes. Do ethics need science? Well, if your ethics aren’t based on sound objective reason and evidence of cause and effect, then what are they based on? No doubt there are many other things ethics may be reasonably based on depending on who you ask, ideas which no doubt have been discussed to death for eons in modern western philosophy, and most likely coming to the usual inconclusive stalemate as is almost always the case. If the foundations for one’s ethics are weak, then the ethical principles are easily swept aside, ignored, or applied situational. It’s one thing to say that we shouldn’t destroy the planet, but if a person can’t sit down with themselves and soundly justify to themselves (NOT others) why they shouldn’t, then their ethical foundations are lacking. In practical terms it doesn’t matter if their ethics are unshakably grounded in science, philosophy, spirituality or religion, as long as they maintain ethical conduct. Permaculture’s ethics are based on the lowest-common denominator of human consensus, objective scientific fact. I’ve written more on the topic here if you’re interested – https://permaculturenews.org/2016/06/23/permaculture-ethics-making-them-work/
The promotion of life as an as an ethical foundation of what is right is quite universal if your make a comparative religion/spirituality/philosophy analysis of the world’s diverse cultures across time, as it’s integral to the harmonious functioning of human communities and the ecological systems that support them. Mentioning killing bacteria is logically appealing to extremes, engaging in reductio ad absurdum arguments, and ‘what the bacteria have to say’ is anthropomorphism lol, you get my point.
Any ‘ism’ is a bad thing as it creates an ideological confine that restricts free thinking within artificial boundaries, what’s needed is both critical and objective reductionist thinking balanced with insightful holistic thinking, imbalance is never a desired state in the view of Eastern philosophies.
Just for a matter of perspective, having spent a decade and a half as a systems engineer working on mission critical systems in many corporations, some with over ten thousand people dependent on them, and most with millions of corporate dollars at stake, many times in senior design roles or as an independent contractor, you get lots of practice engaging in critical thinking, analytic problem solving and holistic systems thinking, you get it wrong, you lose your livelihood, it’s great brain training! : )
I hope this has shed some light on the objectives of this article, it’s a primer on Permaculture’s ethical principles, it explains that they exist in Permaculture, what they actually are, and the lowest-common-denominator logic, reasoning and ecological objective factual knowledge that they’re based on, which would be acceptable to any reasonable person.
Great to hear you’re getting on with it, as am I, life is short and there’s only finite time to make significant efforts to leave the planet in a better state than we found it! As an educator I have other projects in the pipeline which will address reason and an evidence-based approach in permaculture, I’m trained in science, it’s the way I work, so stay tuned! Wishing you well with your organic farm in Argentina, sounds wonderful!
Regards, Angelo