Permaculture principles

My third and final post in preparation for Wednesday’s meeting.

Permaculture makes use of a set of 12 principles, “(t)hinking tools, that when used together, allow us to creatively re-design our environment and our behaviour in a world of less energy and resources.” Each principle is seen as door “that opens into whole systems thinking, providing a different perspective that can be understood at varying levels of depth and application.” They also allow to be applied in other contexts, contributing at other levels to an overall ‘re-design’.

In view of Wednesday’s meeting, but also for my upcoming other taks (see earlier posts),  I have selected three of these doors. The first acts as a kind of theme throughout these posts – ‘becoming’ a tree or observing. For those that watched Richard Powers’ video on his website page, you might have noticed the persistent bird song at the start and later in the back ground. For me this symbolises how ‘becoming’ a tree is also being conscious about that which sits on your branches and lives on you. Bird song is these days almost absent now that it is dark and grey. Funnily enough I recently discovered that my iPhone has an option to be awakened by birth song. I tend to wake up shortly before the ‘alarm’ (which can now hardly be called that anymore) goes off and have a feeling that I already hear the birdsong before it occurs on my phone. This is an effect that I need to study a bit more. The alarm luckily has the option to be turned off during weekends so I will observe the upcoming three days. In any case this synthetic birdsong made me more aware of real birdsong. On the French/German television chain Arte I am watching a series on animal language in which scientists demonstrate how they are slowly capable of actually translating animal language. I would love to add ‘Sparrow’ to my language pairs as a translator.

The second principle I have selected is that of ‘observing patterns’. The image used on the site as an illustration is again that of trees – a canopy in which trees seem to be talking to each other and that you can see above. Thus, opening doors to other systems and observing how they can or how they do talk to each other.

Finally, there is the principle of using edges and valuing the marginal, which chimes perfectly well with my interest in the inframince, the potentiality of differences. Within permaculture it is

(t)he interface between things (…) where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.

So with these three posts I hope I have set out a useful framework for Wednesday’s meeting. I look forward to our conversation. Please note that in my posts I have included some hyperlinks that open up various sites.