Biodiverse Garden – Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com from Pexels

After ditching my idea to name this blog Tequile, I spent a few weeks scratching my head. “It’s not really about urban planning or lifestyle,” I thought. “It’s like a bit of all of those…”

Weeks later, still without ideas, I watched a documentary on Permaculture, a subject I think about quite a bit and I try (and mostly fail) to practice as a hobby gardener. While watching it, I had an idea: Why should the principles of Permaculture be limited only to growing food?

Well, I wasn’t the first to think of this. A quick visit to wiki revealed that the Permaculture ideology can be applied to community.

First, let me define Permaculture some more. It is “Permanent” “Agriculture”, growing food in ways that mimic established ecosystems. The idea is that rather than fight the patterns and habits of plants and animals, utilize them for an end goal. It has also been defined as “Permanent Culture”, which as you can imagine is the application of the ideology to culture.

Food in the U.S. is most commonly grown via industrial monoculture (single plant species) whether organic or conventional. It relies on high quantities of inputs like fuel, pesticides, and fertilizers, causes soil erosion, and has a variety of vulnerabilities like pollution and price drops. It’s a reductionist system that is great for producing large quantities of food at seemingly cheap prices yet it comes with risks and hidden costs.

In the U.S., we’ve built our cities and homes the same way we’ve built our farms. Our cities and towns require a lot of resources to function and because they are such rigid, reductionist systems, they are vulnerable to everything from natural disasters to economic recession. Not to say we can save our cities from natural disasters and recessions simply by designing them differently, but upstream design choices might be able to make considerable differences in the costs and efforts in avoiding disaster. Our cities plow through space and time like bulls in china shops, typically unfolding and evolving at random. The problem with organic development is that sometimes the limbs on the tree of evolution get trimmed and that sometimes means great human suffering.

So what can be done about it? Do we really want an Eye of Sauron overseeing the construction of every sidewalk and planting of every tree in our communities? I don’t think that’s desirable or realistic, do you? As I’ve said before, this blog is my outlet for exploring infrastructure, society, and culture, basically the human habitat. And my hypothesis is that the ideas behind Permaculture and beyond can be used to design our human habitats. It’s not just a question of environmentalism, although that’s an aspect, it’s a question of how we can design more resilient towns, homes, and lives.

I don’t yet propose how this vision of resilient, healthy communities could become a reality. But I do propose more of us explore the means to achieving it. And that’s what I intend to do in this blog.

What if everything from our living rooms to our offices were designed to maximize human enjoyment, improving our wellbeing and productivity with minimal suck on our time and money? Imagine our communities balanced between future, past, and present. No more sacrificing the space and energy of the future for the gains of today. Rather, with every day we move forward, life for ourselves and future generations becomes better and better. It would be a society that is as relatively permanent as our spaceship Earth, a society for the ages.

This resilient society and civilization would adapt and continue to thrive, backed by science and systems thinking and all-encompassing instead of reducing. It’s not just about growing food, it’s about humans that don’t vote themselves off this rock, that thrive indefinitely into the future. Permahumans.

Maybe I’m on the moon with my ideas, maybe not. I’m willing to keep exploring and questioning. Because I believe the rewards of this success are greater than we could ever measure.

May 8, 2019

by Torey

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