Something Else

Sketches on How Culture Changes

Lessons from the ancient world and the labor movement for regenerative culture

In the first post in this series, I wrote that permaculture and sociocracy are off-ramps — essential exits from a destructive highway, but not the destination itself. I ended with a question: if these frameworks help us exit, what does the road ahead actually look like? And how do cultures build new roads in the first place?

My own search for answers took me into historical studies — specifically into the ancient world, where I could watch cultural transformation unfold across centuries and begin to see the underlying patterns. I also studied American history to see how this change looks in the modern world. What I found there has shaped everything about how I understand our work today.

The pattern that emerges, across vastly different contexts and centuries, is both humbling and clarifying. People adopt cultural practices and beliefs that help them survive. These solutions give them hope. Not what is most philosophically elegant. Not what is most ideologically pure. What actually helps them keep their families fed, their communities intact — and what gives meaning to why they’re doing it at all.

There’s a second part to the pattern that matters just as much: people don’t adopt new solutions wholesale. They weave them into what they already know. The new and the existing evolve together into something neither tradition could have predicted alone. When movements try to prevent that weaving, they often enforce rigid orthodoxy. They demand that people abandon their existing ways of understanding the world. These movements almost always fail. They fragment or calcify into institutions that serve their own survival more than the people they were meant to help.

This is both sobering and the most hopeful thing I know for those of us working in regenerative culture.

What follows is a vast oversimplification, but I hope the story-telling here helps to make the larger points.

———

Early Christianity in Egypt

When Christianity arrived in Egypt in the first century CE — tradition holds that Mark the Evangelist brought it to Alexandria — it entered one of the most sophisticated spiritual cultures in the ancient world. Egypt had millennia of religious tradition, profound cosmology, and deep practices around death, the afterlife, and the sacred dimensions of the natural world. You might expect that a new religion would struggle to take hold in such a place. Instead, it took root with remarkable depth and became something distinctly, unmistakably Egyptian.

Why? In part because it met real needs at a moment of cultural stress. Roman imperial rule had destabilized Egyptian society. The early Christian communities offered something the empire did not: burial societies that guaranteed dignified interment regardless of wealth, mutual aid networks that cared for the sick, and community structures that held people through hardship. This was not abstract spiritual appeal. It was practical. It kept families alive and gave the dead their dignity. People adopted it because it worked.

But it also offered something harder to quantify: hope and meaning at a moment when the old structures of meaning were under pressure. The resurrection promise, the radical equality of souls, the sense that the suffering of the present moment was not the final word — these things resonated in a community living under occupation and facing the erosion of its ancient identity.

And crucially, Egyptian Christians did not simply replace their existing understanding with imported theology. The iconography of Isis nursing the infant Horus flowed almost seamlessly into images of Mary and the Christ child. The ancient Egyptian cross, the ankh — symbol of life — was absorbed into the Coptic cross. The desert monks who developed Christian monasticism were drawing on existing Egyptian traditions of solitary spiritual retreat. What emerged was Coptic Christianity: recognizably Christian, and irreducibly Egyptian. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE would try to enforce a single, standardized Christology across the empire. The Coptic Church refused. The attempt to impose doctrinal uniformity from above nearly destroyed the relationship between Alexandria and Rome — and the Coptic Church survived, and continues to this day, precisely because it remained rooted in its own cultural soil.

———

Buddhism and the Making of Ch’an

The story of Buddhism traveling the Silk Road into China offers an even more dramatic example of the same process.

Buddhism arrived in China roughly around the first century CE, but for several centuries it remained something of a foreign import — studied by scholars, practiced in monasteries, but not yet woven into the fabric of Chinese life. What changed was not missionary effort or imperial decree. What changed was that Buddhism found its meeting point with what China already knew.

In Central Asian communities along the trade routes, Buddhism had spread in part because the monasteries were rest stops — literal places of refuge for merchants and pilgrims crossing brutal terrain. They provided food, shelter, community, and a framework for understanding the suffering and uncertainty of trade-route life. The dharma offered a coherent account of impermanence that was not denial but a practical tool for living with it. This was useful. It met real needs. And so it traveled.

golden buddha statue in seoul temple
Photo by ki-mock koo on Pexels.com

When Buddhism encountered Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, something remarkable happened. Chinese thinkers didn’t simply accept Indian Buddhist metaphysics. They asked: what does this mean in conversation with what we already understand about the natural world, about the ineffable Tao, about the importance of direct experience over textual authority? Over centuries, that dialogue produced Ch’an Buddhism — what the Japanese would later call Zen — which is perhaps the most thoroughgoing example of syncretism in religious history.

Ch’an took Buddhism’s meditative core and rewired it through Taoist sensibility. Where Indian Buddhism was often text-heavy and scholastic, Ch’an declared itself “a special transmission outside the scriptures.” The sudden enlightenment that comes not from accumulating doctrine but from direct encounter with reality — the famous koan, the master’s unexpected gesture — these were not in the original Indian package. They emerged from the encounter between Buddhist practice and the Taoist understanding of naturalness, spontaneity, and the limits of conceptual knowledge.

The Indian monks who first carried the dharma across the mountains would not have recognized it. That is precisely the point. Ch’an Buddhism is not a corruption of the original. It is what happened when profound wisdom met a living culture and both were transformed. It has endured for fifteen centuries because it is genuinely rooted, not merely transplanted.

———

What Mutual Aid History Teaches Us

The history of mutual aid in the United States tells the same story in a more recent register, and it is a history that has been systematically obscured.

From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth, mutual aid societies were among the most vital institutions in American working-class life. Immigrant communities — German, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Chinese, Mexican — built elaborate networks of fraternal organizations, benevolent societies, and burial clubs that provided what the state did not: sickness benefits, death benefits, loans, childcare, legal help, community belonging. African American communities, excluded from white institutions by law and by violence, built parallel mutual aid networks of extraordinary sophistication — mutual aid was foundational to Black community survival from the era of slavery forward. Firefighters in urban centers also created some of the initial mutual aid groups leading to the idea of modern insurance programs.

These were not ideological projects, at least not primarily. People participated because the societies worked. When you were sick and couldn’t work, the society paid your rent. When your husband died, the community buried him and helped feed your children through the winter. Each immigrant group also brought its own cultural forms — its particular governance traditions, its existing sense of what mutual obligation meant — and wove those into the new structures. The ideology, where it existed, came after the practice.

The rise of the welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, whatever its genuine benefits, also crowded out this independent infrastructure. Insurance companies lobbied against mutual aid societies as competitors. The cultural story shifted: the state would care for you, or the market would. What communities had built for themselves began to seem unnecessary.

In each of these three examples, we could look at patterns of intense change and pressure. There is also incredible opportunity for exchange and dialogue among travelers, scholars, migrants, and merchants who are carrying ideas. I find it all fascinating and instructive.

What we’re watching now — in the solidarity economy movement, in food sovereignty networks, in the resurgence of mutual aid during the pandemic — is not something new. It is something very old reasserting itself because the conditions that made it necessary have returned. People are building buying clubs and tool libraries and childcare cooperatives and seed libraries not because they’ve been convinced of an ideology, but because these things work — and because they offer something the market increasingly cannot: genuine community, genuine belonging, genuine stake in each other’s survival.

This is the pattern. This is always the pattern.

———

What This Means for Our Work

Cultural change is slow. Genuinely, structurally slow —  because culture is the accumulated solution set of a community. It doesn’t shift until the old solutions stop working, or until new ones demonstrably do better at meeting the needs people actually have: economic security, belonging, meaning, hope for their children.

The historical pattern also carries a warning that I think is particularly important for regenerative movements to hear. Every example I’ve studied — Coptic Christianity, Ch’an Buddhism, mutual aid societies, the cooperative movement — succeeded in part because it allowed for adaptation. It let people bring what they already knew. It did not demand that newcomers abandon their existing frameworks before they could participate. When movements have tried to enforce doctrinal purity — to insist on one correct permaculture practice, one right way to run a sociocracy circle, one authentic form of nature connection — they have tended to shrink rather than grow, to become communities of the already-converted rather than living cultures that spread because they genuinely help people.

This doesn’t mean anything goes, or that there are no core principles worth holding. It means we hold those principles with enough flexibility to let them take root in different soils. The permaculture practiced on a working farm in rural Kentucky will look different from what’s practiced at an urban food forest in Detroit, and both will look different from what develops in a community garden in Nairobi. That’s not drift. That’s the pattern working correctly.

The most important work we can do is not to convince anyone that our frameworks are philosophically correct. It’s to demonstrate — through working farms, through functional co-ops, through communities that survive conflict and come back stronger — that these approaches actually meet needs the dominant culture is failing to meet. To be what the Buddhist monasteries on the Silk Road were: places of genuine refuge and practical help, not monuments to an ideology.

And it means building from where we actually are, with the people who are actually here, meeting the needs that are actually pressing. Not the idealized future community, but this watershed, this struggling nonprofit board, this farmer watching her soil wash away and not knowing what else to try.

———

But there is one more condition for cultural change that history reveals — and it’s the one we most resist talking about in regenerative circles. The communities that actually built something lasting were not made of people who had simply adopted better ideas. They were made of people who had done real interior work. Who had metabolized enough of their own suffering to stop unconsciously inflicting it on the people around them.

That’s what the final post in this series is about.

This is the second in a three-part series written in preparation for the Global Earth Repair Conference. (Though I have one important piece to write about society and culture that will accompany the series).

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fast moving cars on an expressway between green trees
Future Care, Something Else, System Transformation

Beyond the Off-Ramp, part 1

Beyond the Off-Ramp: Notes Toward a Regenerative Culture

The Off-Ramp Is Not the Destination

Systems thinking is the beginning of cultural change, not the end

The journey led me to dynamic governance (or sociocracy). It also had me asking questions about the limits of permaculture. I began to wonder about other systems thinking tools. I started talking about both permaculture and dynamic governance as off-ramps from the destructive systems our current civilization engages in. But that led to the obvious question—off ramp to where? 

fast moving cars on an expressway between green trees

If you had asked me that question in the middle of my own permaculture design course, I would have said that just implementing permaculture as I imagined it was enough. After decades of teaching permaculture, I have worked in permaculture groups. I have seen the unhealed, personal patterns people bring to those projects. I know this is just the beginning of the off ramp. It is not the destination. 

I watch people new to permaculture or sociocracy. They become inspired by a new structure. Then, they transfer all their old dysfunction into it. I believe in these frameworks and tools. I teach them. I will keep teaching them.

And I think we need to be honest about what they are and what they aren’t.

Let me say it another way. Permaculture and sociocracy are off-ramps. They have cousins in the broader ecosystem of regenerative design, nonviolent communication, restorative justice, and conscious governance. They are ways of exiting the highway of extractive, hierarchical, disconnected culture. That is no small thing. Finding an off-ramp when you’ve been speeding toward a cliff is lifesaving. But an off-ramp is not a home. It’s a transition. And we do ourselves harm when we mistake the exit for the destination.

———

There’s a seduction to systems thinking that I’ve felt in myself and watched in others. When you discover that ecosystems don’t produce waste, you realize that everything is connected to everything else. When you understand that seven layers of a food forest can emerge from one coherent design logic, something in you exhales. This is the answer. When you discover that organizations can make decisions without ego-driven need or domination, you feel a revelation. A circle structure can distribute power without dissolving accountability. You want to give it to everyone, immediately, like medicine.

peach blossoms

The problem isn’t that these tools are wrong. They’re moving in the right direction. But there are other needs that arise as we exit the highway. One problem is that a framework, no matter how elegant, cannot metabolize grief. A design principle cannot teach you to feel the soil under your feet as something you belong to rather than something you manage. A governance structure cannot tell you who you are when the old story of progress and separation finally collapses.

Systems thinking tells us how. It is largely silent on the question of what lies underneath it all.

———

I’ve watched permaculture projects fail. Rarely because the design was bad (and let’s admit that no design is perfect). Almost always it is because the people couldn’t stay in relationship with each other, with the land, with the uncertainty of a living system that doesn’t follow a plan. I’ve hesitated to do design work where the client doesn’t come to OWN the work themselves. It’s their relationship to the land they care for that matters more than anything else. 

I’ve also watched sociocracy implementations that created beautifully documented circles and domains. Then they were filled with the same unexamined power dynamics. There was the same avoidance of hard conversations. The organization experienced the same ungrieved losses that had haunted them for years. The container changed. What was held inside it did not.

This isn’t a critique of the tools. It’s an observation about what the tools cannot do alone.

What they cannot do alone is give us back a felt sense of belonging — not belonging to a movement or a philosophy, but to place and to a people. To a specific piece of land whose seasonal rhythms shape your body. To a watershed you can name. To the non-human community that was here before any of us and will be here, in some form, after. Mainstream culture teaches us that people cannot be trusted. It tells us that we can pick up and move at any time. It also suggests that no relationship is permanent. I’m not saying don’t have boundaries—that would be hypocritical of me and unhealthy. But I am saying we’ve learned to not trust people. In my experience, working with people in Sociocracy for All has been incredible. It has taught me how to have hard conversations and build trust.

This is the thing that got lost long before our governance structures went wrong. The extractive economy didn’t begin with capitalism. It began, many would argue, with the severing of that felt connection — the story that told us we were separate from, rather than embedded in, the living world. Every system we’ve built since has been downstream of that wound.

———

So what does the road ahead look like — the one these off-ramps lead to? I want to be careful here, because I think the impulse to design it in advance is itself part of the old pattern. We cannot permaculture our way to a living culture. We cannot sociocracy our way to belonging. These are things that grow, not things that are built. 

But we can begin to think about the conditions that allow them to grow. One important condition, I believe, is understanding how people adapt their society and their culture. It’s not about how we wish change worked; it’s about how it has always worked throughout human history.

That’s what the next post in this series is about.

This is the first in a three-part series written in preparation for the Global Earth Repair Conference.

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misty path
People Care, Personal Transformation, Something Else, System Transformation

Wandering

Returning to Permaculture: Starting from the Ground Up

When COVID-19 reshaped our world in 2020, I found myself stepping back from the permaculture organizing and design work that had been central to my life. What began as a necessary pause became something more profound—a time of reflection, healing, and ultimately, transformation.

The Stepping Back

The decision to step away wasn't simple or singular. COVID created immediate practical barriers to the hands-on, community-centered work that permaculture thrives on. In the weeks before the shut-down, I had been slated to return to Belize to teach at MMRF, but had the intuition to cancel. (That's another story). If I'm honest, the pandemic also gave me permission to acknowledge something I'd been noticing for a while: patterns in permaculture spaces that didn't quite add up.

My own health and personal struggles during this period brought things into sharper focus. While I was learning to listen to my body's limits, to recognize rest as essential rather than optional, and to understand healing as its own kind of work, I was also noticing contradictions around me. People talking about "care of people" while running themselves into the ground or maintaining an extractive mindset. Abundance mindsets that seemed to mask deeper anxieties. Claims of sustainability from those whose personal practices and relationships seemed to contradict our ethics and principles. 

I needed space to sort through what was working from what wasn't—both in the movement and in my own approach.

monarch on hand

What the Pause Taught Me

Stepping back from permaculture organizing didn't mean stepping back from learning. In fact, this period became unexpectedly rich with insight as I found myself deep in other work that would profoundly shape how I understood community, decision-making, and the transformative work of regenerative culture.

My role as executive director at Sociocracy for All opened up entirely new territory. Working with dynamic governance and sociocratic principles, I was learning how organizations actually function—not in theory, but in practice. I was seeing how groups make decisions, how power moves through groups, how consent differs from consensus, how structure can either support or undermine the people within it. This wasn't abstract organizational theory; it was daily problem-solving with real people navigating real tensions. The work we've done in the past two years is some of the most difficult any organization can undertake--and we've done amazingly well with it.

At the same time, my experience with Tracker School, its instructors, and elders was teaching me something complementary but different. There was a directness there, a groundedness in immediate awareness and personal responsibility that cut through a lot of the conceptual layers I'd been working with. The tracking mentality—reading what's actually there, following what's real, trusting direct observation over assumption—became a lens I couldn't unsee. The healing and caretaking work learned there, and at the related school, Wilderness Fusion, invited me to work on healing "my Earth" -- my body, mind, and spirit. 

These two streams of experience started converging with what I'd learned in permaculture. I could see the patterns more clearly now: how permaculture principles weren't just about land design but about any living system, including teams and organizations. How the observation skills I'd learned tracking applied to group dynamics. (I had already been vocalizing how the inner and outer landscapes merge in our design work; but this took on new depth.) How the governance structures we were implementing at Sociocracy for All addressed some of the exact dysfunctions I'd witnessed in permaculture spaces.

I began to understand that my years in permaculture had given me frameworks for understanding systems, relationships, and change itself—but these other experiences were showing me how those frameworks applied to the human systems I'd struggled with. The principles of observation, of working with rather than against, of seeing connections and patterns—these worked just as well for understanding organizations and group dynamics as they did for understanding ecosystems.

But the most important realization came slowly, through all of these experiences together: personal health, well-being, and growth aren't separate from permaculture—they are fundamental to it.

This wasn't abstract. It was intensely practical. I couldn't design sustainable systems if I couldn't maintain my own energy. I couldn't teach regenerative practices while depleting myself. I couldn't facilitate healthy team dynamics or community processes while ignoring my own need for rest and renewal. And I was seeing, again and again across different contexts, that the same was true for everyone else. If teachers, organizers, or designers do not address the internal patterns they carry; they will recreate systems that harm the Earth, people, and the future.  

Permaculture principles apply to the practitioner, not just the practice. Dynamic governance only works when the people using it are functioning well. Tracking skills require a tracker who's present and grounded. Care of people includes caring for yourself. It has to, or nothing else lasts.

Moving Forward Differently

I'm returning to permaculture now, but I'm returning with a different toolkit and a broader perspective. My experience with dynamic governance has given me practical frameworks for how groups can actually function well together—how to structure decision-making, how to clarify roles and responsibilities, how to create feedback loops that work. The tracking mindset has sharpened my ability to read what's actually happening rather than what I think should be happening. And my work with teams at Sociocracy for All has shown me that sustainable community isn't accidental—it requires intentional structure and honest assessment.

misty path

I'm more committed than ever to fostering permaculture community, but grounded in something I see now as essential: walking the talk. And I now have clearer ideas about what that actually looks like in practice.

By this, I don't mean perfection. I mean being willing to look honestly at what's working and what isn't—in our own lives first, then in our communities. It means building practices that are actually sustainable, not just in theory but in lived reality. It means closing the gap between what we teach and how we live. It means applying the same observation and feedback principles to our human systems that we apply to our land systems.

Self-responsibility is central to this. In permaculture, we design for meeting our own needs, for managing our outputs, for understanding our impact. That same approach extends to our personal well-being, our patterns, our capacity, and what we need to function well. We can't build healthy communities while ignoring our own health. We can't create regenerative systems while running ourselves down. This isn't just permaculture wisdom—it's what I learned watching organizations struggle or thrive, what I learned from tracking instructors who modeled groundedness, what I learned from facilitating governance processes that only worked when people were actually resourced enough to participate.

And perhaps most importantly, I want to help build a permaculture movement that genuinely considers future generations—not just in what we leave behind, but in how we model living. Future generations need more than good soil and clean water. They need examples of people who learned to pace themselves, who built sustainable personal practices, who created communities with clear structure and real accountability, who were honest about what worked and what didn't.

An Invitation

If you're reading this and feeling the resonance of these questions, know that you're not alone. Maybe you've also noticed the gap between permaculture's promise and some of its practices. Maybe you've also struggled with balancing taking care of systems with taking care of yourself. Maybe you've also wondered how to build something truly sustainable when even well-intentioned communities sometimes lack the structure and processes to support that sustainability.

I believe permaculture's principles and practices are robust enough to address these questions. I believe the movement is mature enough now to look honestly at where things haven't been working, to learn from what we've tried, to adjust our approach with the same attention we give to our gardens. And I believe we can draw on insights from other fields—including dynamic governance and organizational development—to strengthen how we work together.

The work I'm most interested in now is helping create spaces where personal well-being and permaculture practice are understood as interconnected. Where we can talk about what's working and what needs adjustment. Where we have clear structures for making decisions and navigating conflict. Where self-responsibility isn't just about managing our waste streams but about managing ourselves. Where we apply the same observation skills to our teams and communities that we apply to our ecosystems.

generations

This is my invitation: to anyone who sees permaculture not just as techniques but as a practical framework for living well on this earth, and who's willing to bring other tools and perspectives to the work. Let's build this together—starting from where we actually are, building from what actually works, learning from multiple disciplines and the lived experience we've gained wandering in our own lives.

The pause taught me that sometimes the most productive thing we can do is stop, rest, heal, and return when we're ready—bringing with us everything we've learned from that time, including what we learned elsewhere.

I'm ready now. And I'm grateful for what the stepping back taught me about stepping forward—and for the unexpected teachers and experiences that filled that time.

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Earth Care, Future Care, People Care, Something Else

Go back to the fundamentals…

This quote seems more applicable today than ever before:

“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex,
the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”

― Bill Mollison

In the 20 years since my own permaculture design course, I am reminded again and again to return to the basics of permaculture design. It’s the “chop wood, carry water” kind of simplicity that I find comforting.

Permaculture offers a holistic approach to thriving and living that extends far beyond gardening. At its core are three foundational ethics that guide all permaculture practices: Care for the Earth, Care for People, and Care for the Future (often called “Fair Share” or “Return of Surplus”). Within this ethical framework, there are some key practices.

Care for the Earth

The first ethic recognizes our responsibility to protect and nurture natural ecosystems. This ethic is first because without it, we cannot meet any of the other needs.

  • Am I improving the life in the soil around me?
  • Am I increasing the biodiversity and capacity of the Earth around me to sustain itself?
  • Do I know how to use the plants and resources around me sustainably to meet me own needs?

Building Healthy Soil

Healthy soil is the foundation of all permaculture systems. This involves:

  • Composting organic matter to create nutrient-rich humus
  • Practicing no-till or minimal tillage techniques to preserve soil structure
  • Using mulch to protect soil, retain moisture, and suppress weeds
  • Incorporating diverse microorganisms through compost teas and biofertilizers

Creating Biodiversity

Biodiversity creates resilient ecosystems that resist pests and disease:

  • Planting polycultures rather than monocultures
  • Including native plants that support local wildlife
  • Creating habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and other organisms including water features and nesting spaces.
  • Establishing food forests with multiple vegetation layers

Water Conservation and Management

Water-wise practices include:

  • Capturing and storing rainwater through swales, ponds, and tanks
  • Using drip irrigation and other efficient watering methods
  • Designing landscapes that slow, spread, and sink water
  • Creating microclimates that reduce evaporation and water needs

Care for People

The second ethic focuses on meeting human needs sustainably and equitably.

  • Am I caring for my own well-being? We’ve inherited a number of stressors in our lives and between generations. It is important for us to act from a place of rest and capacity.
  • How am I doing at caring for my family?
  • My community and the communities I interact with?

Sustainable Shelter

Human habitation can be designed to work with nature. Most likely we will be adapting existing structures. Whenever possible, we want to be:

  • Building with natural, local, and low-impact materials
  • Designing passive solar homes that require minimal external energy
  • Integrating living spaces with productive landscapes
  • Creating comfortable microclimates through strategic planting

Food (and Water) Security and Sovereignty

Access to healthy food and clean water is a fundamental human right:

  • Growing diverse, nutritious foods using organic methods
  • Saving and sharing seeds to preserve genetic diversity
  • Creating food systems that require minimal external inputs
  • Teaching food production, preservation, and preparation skills

Community Building

Strong communities are resilient communities:

  • Establishing community gardens and food forests
  • Creating skill-sharing networks and workshops
  • Fostering intergenerational knowledge transfer
  • Supporting local economies through farmers’ markets and CSAs

Care for the Future

The third ethic acknowledges our responsibility to future generations and the equitable distribution of resources.

Reducing Waste and Closing Loops

Creating systems where “waste” becomes a resource:

  • Practicing the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle
  • Converting “waste” streams into useful products (humanure, greywater systems)
  • Designing for durability and repairability
  • Implementing regenerative practices that build rather than deplete resources

Energy Conservation and Renewable Sources

Moving beyond fossil fuels:

  • Maximizing energy efficiency in homes and systems
  • Using appropriate renewable technologies like solar, wind, and micro-hydro
  • Designing systems that require minimal energy inputs
  • Creating energy storage solutions for resilience

Seed Saving and Heritage Preservation

Safeguarding biological and cultural heritage:

  • Maintaining seed libraries of open-pollinated varieties
  • Documenting traditional ecological knowledge
  • Passing down sustainable practices to younger generations
  • Protecting land through conservation easements and trusts

Integration Through Design

What makes permaculture unique is how these practices are woven together through thoughtful design. Permaculture design principles—like obtaining a yield, using and valuing diversity, and catching and storing energy—provide the framework for implementing these ethics in practical ways.

The most effective permaculture systems address all three ethics simultaneously. For example, a well-designed food forest cares for the earth by building soil and creating habitat, cares for people by providing nutritious food and medicine, and cares for the future by sequestering carbon, cleaning water, and preserving biodiversity.

By centering these three ethics in our design decisions, permaculture offers a pathway toward truly sustainable and regenerative living that benefits all life on Earth—now and for generations to come.

So, at the end of the day, I look at what I have accomplished. Is the soil a little better today? Is there capacity to hold water appropriately in the landscape? Did I see a new species or old friends? Did I harvest something from the garden? Have I interacted with my loved ones in a positive way? Have I done something to help my community or helped those who help others in their communities?

The solutions really are simple.

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yellow daylily
Something Else

Just for Fun: A persistent lily

late day lily

This beautiful, fragile flower reminds me so much of squash blossoms. I am appreciating the delicate veins in the petals and the way it is folded and curled. But what is most lovely about the blossom is that this lily has kept on putting blooms out after (two weeks? three?) the other lilies stopped. It keeps reaching out to the sun. 

I find that hopeful and beautiful. 

How do you keep reaching for the sun and sharing your glorious nature? 

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flood waters - CC0 via Pixabay
Something Else

Rain events, climate change, and community flooding

Over the past weekend our community saw 7″ of rain within a 24-hour period. Most of that precipitation came down within about 90 minutes. It is easy to recognize this kind of event as a climate-change related phenomena. Such events are becoming more frequent for our area. Rather than a persistent drought, we are likely to see more rain in more intense events like this one. Our community began tracking rainfall in 1895. From 1910 to 1990 there were 10 of the highest rainfalls on record. Between 1991 and 2021 we’ve had 10. The flooding that resulted was deadly and damaging. We need to respond on a personal level with our own home-designs, and on a community level. 

A couple of things to consider

A local activist berated city leadership for investing in public structures like a parking garage instead of better addressing climate change (1). This kind of concern–and even righteous indignation– is understandable, but he did not offer any productive suggestions. I think it would be more helpful to point toward what is needed and offer compelling arguments based on data and observation of what is working. For example, a wetlands project on the north side of the city managed the water flow from several neighborhoods and showed remarkable resilience.

Our community needs similar projects which daylight and filter water flows throughout the community. One of the more challenging aspects of these rain events is the channelized flow of water from campus through the middle of the city. For decades this waterway has been sent underground — under businesses. How many cycles of flooded basements and businesses can we carry forward into the future?

Adapting permaculture

Permaculture originated in an area dealing with decades-long droughts. Swales and ponds to catch and store water make a lot of sense in a dry climate. However, in a temperate area with increasing rainfall, design solutions cannot be haphazardly adopted.

I have been advising against placing swales upslope from structures for a while now. Saturating the water table above a foundation will not work in this area any longer. I believe French drains are also insufficient. Rather, earthworks that consistently and reliably move water around and away from foundations make sense. Put your swales and water-catchment earthworks either to the side or down slope to protect your home.

We can use the design process to safeguard our homes AND increase life-sustaining systems. I calculated that in our small yard, the “upslope” generated about 29,790 gallons of water in about 90 minutes. This doesn’t include confirmed runoff from neighboring properties upslope.

People regularly underestimate what is going on. A 50-gallon rain barrel is not sufficient to irrigate a garden. How did the rain gardens fare during the recent events? My suspicion is that they were not especially helpful. (Contact me if you have data to the contrary.)

Rather, a slightly different kind of earthwork can direct water where we want it to go and provide interesting opportunities for cultivating life and living well. Tanks, cisterns, “dry” creek beds, ponds, and other catchments and holding systems can benefit us, and reduce the amount of runoff municipal systems have to deal with, but we need better observation and analysis. We need better design. Ultimately, there are difficult choices ahead.

 

  1. To be fair, this person has made many suggestions over the years. The post I saw did not.

Need some advice?

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IU students in the garden
Something Else

Why invest in a PDC?

This post is likely to change over time…just as our understanding of how permaculture fits in the world changes over time. 

It is often said there are as many definitions of permaculture as there are practitioners. One of the permaculture elders documented dozens of definitions many years ago. Just the same, everyone comes to study permaculture for different reasons.

2008 Ohio PDC

Here are some of the things Rhonda has seen and recognized after teaching the design course for more than fifteen years:

Permaculture designers and educators have curated some of the best strategies, tools, and techniques to support anyone in the work of Earth Repair. Because permaculture designers work from an integrated, systems approach, the capacity to come up with elegant, efficient solutions have been noted by leaders in Earth Repair projects (including the Ecosystem Restoration Camps). By extension, permaculture projects can build resilience into communities and regions. This might be an extension of #4 if we agree that earth repair is a global need. At the same time, there have been incredible inspirations and connections on a community-level through permaculture-inspired movements like Transition Towns, and similar efforts. 

Permaculture helps people do their own work. Whether you are looking to start a farm, want to improve your veggies, or start a neighborhood project…permaculture design helps people make significant progress in their goals for living a more resilient life. Most students conclude it is one of the best investments of their time and energy, and that they wish they’d taken the course earlier in their lives. (We’re working on how to work with children more, too!) Some of my best design clients also either took the course first, or after the design was in the implementation phase. The PDC is just the beginning.

Studying layers and systems in Belize, 2018.
Studying layers and systems in Belize, 2018.

Others who are passionate about solving problems and leaving the world a better place. The sense of community and the connection to others exploring the same territory is always valuable. The network of practitioners continues to grow around the world, and they can inspire each other to keep going and keep improving. (That’s part of the reason Rhonda loves editing Permaculture Design so much.)

Permaculture opens doors to the connections between many disciplines in a practical way. With permaculture, I found that I have license to dive into everything from policy to architecture to biology to physics to archeology and so much more. It can be overwhelming to adult learners to defy our society’s push toward specialization, but part of permaculture’s powerful paradigm shifts are facilitated by emphasizing the connections and perspectives gained by doing so. It also gave me space to talk about familial history, skills, and understanding in a way that honors the success and challenges of those who came before me while working to make life for those who come after a bit better.

Food. Water. Shelter. Energy. Mainstream society’s means of providing these basic needs to date have been incredibly damaging to the earth and to people. Our health, economic, and governance systems balance on the precipice of collapse because of this. Beyond this, people have real needs for belonging, participation, autonomy, and creativity which are ignored within the fast-paced, crushing nature of society. Permaculture seeks to meet the real needs (not all of the wants) in a way which brings us together.

bee and coneflower

The PDC facilitates understanding of the shifting dynamics of the world around us. When we pull one thread, sometimes unexpected things happen. When we build soil, plant trees, establish pollinator gardens, invite the neighbors to tea, or stop flying or driving as much there are also (hopefully) positive consequences. Permaculture can help us see these threads and learn to act in increasingly positive cycles. 

Permaculture design complements other communities of learners and practitioners. Because permaculture design process incorporates analysis and strategies from many different sources, it is also allied with many different practices, groups, and disciplines. Nature Connection people, agroecology, agroforestry, Holistic Management, ecovillages, vegan and vegetarianism, sociocratic governance systems, and many other movements blend well with permaculture. What I find especially helpful to recognize, is that as long as the ethics are observed, permaculture is a design process–a problem-solving approach, which can unite people across many differences in action towards common aims. I find that hopeful. 

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