Recalling the Basics

Sometimes a book's impact has less to do with the book itself and more to do with its timing in your life. There were novels I was tasked with reading in high school whose subtleties swept right past my young and otherwise-occupied mind as I groped for any theme that might satisfy my essay requirements. I suspect they'd be wholly different reads if I revisited them today.

For whatever reason, the timing's been right of late to take a fresh look at Bill Mollison's "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual". My first encounter with this 559 page tome was at a work-stay property in New Zealand 28 years ago where our energetic and idealistic hosts were in the early stages of regenerating their land using the book as a primary guide. Tending to our two very young children at the time, I was a few brain cells short of what Bill Mollison's words appeared to require. Many years later when I took a permaculture design course in Calgary, the book was included with tuition. It was referenced throughout the lessons and we were encouraged to familiarize ourselves with it, of course, but again it struck me as too dense, too impenetrable. Even lugging it all the way to North Carolina for a more extended permaculture training didn't prompt me to get my nose between the pages. It has since sat, mostly unopened, on a prominent bookshelf where I feel proud to have it as part of my library, but also a tad sheepish that I'm not better-versed in its contents.

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  It's a hefty volume...

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  with an intimidating amount of information

It's a hefty volume... ...with an intimidating amount of detail

I can't recall what inspired me to open it anew some weeks ago. But it's the first pages, where Mollison articulates a treatise on how humans may ethically and sustainably live on this Earth, before it gets into the more nitty gritty design strategies, that I've found highly readable and highly relevant. Far from being impenetrable, the writing's almost conversational, peppered with opinion both principled and pointed, even a wee bit prickly at times. It's not that the concepts themselves are new to me (I've covered them in my studies), but it's the experience of reading them from the source material, in the author's own voice, that has had me nodding along: "This guy's onto something here!"

Now, permaculture thinking isn't Mollison's invention; in partnership with David Holmgren, he mostly borrowed and synthesized longstanding indigenous worldviews along with newer scientific principles. Maybe the fact that it's not a trendy invention of one or two modern minds, but draws rather from a deeper well of time-tested traditional knowledge, is why the three foundational ethics laid out on page 2 feel unimpeachable:

1. Earth Care

2. People Care

3. Fair Share

Who can argue with those? The above wording of the ethics is the most common, but actually differs from that of the "Designer's Manual", having seen new iterations over time. The third ethic, especially, has been reinterpreted freely, sometimes going by "Share the Surplus" or "Future Care", and it's this one that I find the most interesting.

Earth Care and People Care, while not necessarily easy or intuitive to institute in today's society, are fairly self-explanatory directives: Allow all life systems on the planet to thrive and allow all humans the necessaries for a healthy life. Fair Share is the one that most obviously butts heads with "western" civilization and the capitalist economy as we know it because it demands that we recognize "enoughness" and honour limits, that once we have what we need or can reasonably use for ourselves, we turn the rest over to the earth, other people, and future generations. This relinquishing of surplus to feed the cycle of life from which we all continuously draw is a natural law of sorts – all beings and living systems abide by it. But it's not exactly compatible with growing the GDP or accumulating without bounds as we're taught we should be free to do.

Some of our front yard understory plants, grown of their own accord from deer droppings – a deer's version of returning the surplus

A book's impact depends also on what other things you happen to be reading (or listening to) around the same time and how those become co-digested. I recently re-read Robin Wall Kimmerer's "The Serviceberry" which dovetails beautifully with this third permaculture ethic, describing why and how we might weave a "return of the gift" into our economic practices. Taoism, too, speaks of three treasures, one of which is frugality – not miserliness, but the moderate and restrained use of resources for oneself with the express purpose of having surplus to share more broadly. As it happens, Mollison cites Taoism as one of his influences.

Can anyone really argue that we shouldn't care for the earth, care for other people, and take only our fair share? Does anyone not feel a spark of "Yes, that's the kind of world I want to live in; that's how I want to orient my actions!"? If we feel resistance, it likely only comes from the practical challenge of implementing these tenets in a system built around opposing ethics. But my sense is that, whether we lean left or right politically, whether we worship a deity or not, whatever our ethnicity or income level, we have something here we can all agree on. These three ethics aren't a political ideology or religion, they're simply a lens or filter by which we can deem something to be on the right track or not. How well does a political platform or spiritual practice align with these lodestars? Is there a way to better-align what we eat, how we do our jobs, or how we frame the smallest of goals with these ethics we've agreed are rock solid?

I like this approach because, while it doesn't necessarily provide all the answers, it does allow a bunch of less-relevant noise and misguidance to drop out of the equation. And it means that, beneath all the current bluster, tension, and contempt, most of us can actually agree on something. So, there's a nugget gleaned from a fresh look at an old book. Perhaps The Stone Angel or The Grapes of Wrath would be similarly fruitful!