Making Permaculture Stronger

Enjoy part of two of this rich dialogue about bringing Living Design Process to professional permaculture design consultancy. Will make more sense if you listen to Part One first. An aerial photo of the Mayberry project which is mentioned in this episode and is a good example of a design process that uses earthworks and trees to create beautiful organic spaces in between…

It was an honour to connect in this episode with Daniel Christian Wahl to explore what it means to align with life’s regenerative impulse. Here’s Daniel’s book Designing Regenerative Cultures, his Medium Blog and here’s his wonderful youtube series Voices of the Regeneration. Early on Daniel mentions Christopher Alexander’s Challenge to Permaculture. A few times he mentions Henri Bortoft’s book The Wholeness of Nature. Daniel Christian Wahl Enjoy, thanks to Daniel for visiting Making Permaculture Stronger, and thanks to our mutual friend Clinton Callahan for connecting us.

On March 17, 2022, at 85 years of age, Christopher Alexander passed away peacefully in his home in West Sussex, England. This post celebrates his life, and for me, personally, the sheer magnitude his work has had on the course of my life, including Making Permaculture Stronger as a project. If any of you have been touched by this project, then you have been indirectly impacted by Alexander’s life-long quest toward life, beauty and wholeness. Find out about who Alexander was here and here and here and here. Learn about Alexander’s direct influence on my (Dan Palmer’s) work, and on this very project here and here. A Poem Thank you to Ann Medlock, a past client (and hence collaborator) of Alexander’s, for permission to share these photos and this poem here: Alexander sculpts a building out of air and wisdom waving his hands squinting his eyes to see what only he and God can see in this clearing on the bluff. Listening to something we cannot hear, he brings into being a house so solid, silent and calm, so embracing, consoling and inevitable, that it draws in and restores every open soul that finds its way here. And many do. Pilgrims who have heard, who’ve seen a photograph, who sense that here there is something mysterious, rare, perhaps even inspired. On a clear blue afternoon we sit at a long table in the sun, the house embracing this garden and all of us who bask here amid the calendulas and ferns. Feasting on tabouli and cold birds, we talk of poetry and paintings, of terraces in Tuscany and homemade wine, of our work, our passions, our quests. We are friends, gathered here by the grace that emanates from this holy place. At Christmas, the clan assembles. The tree, dressed in familiar ornaments, touches the coffered ceiling and sends the scent of balsam to mingle with fire, roast and cakes. Thick walls hold out the cold, the wind, and every danger of the world we know. Comets cut across the high windows as we are drawn in and held fast, together, blessed by the house that Alexander made, while listening to God. Three Examples of Directly Alexander-Inspired Design Processes https://vimeo.com/456075580/0e4846f331 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2k35m_Q9xg&ab_channel=MakingPermacultureStronger https://youtu.be/l8lffVxj7DI Some Quotes Here I share a selection of some of my favourite quotes from Alexander’s many books. The Timeless Way of Building (1979) You are alive when you are wholehearted, true to yourself, true to your own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations you are in. […] To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same. Of course, if you are alive, you are not always happy in the sense of feeling pleasant; experiences of joy are balanced by experiences of sorrow. But the experiences are all deeply felt; and above all, you are whole; and conscious of being real. To be alive, in this sense, is not a matter of suppressing some forces or tendencies, at the expense of others; it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in you can find expression; you live in balance among the forces which arise in you; you are unique as the pattern of forces which arises is unique; you are at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet, at one with yourself and your surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work. There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that you need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that you are entirely responsible for your problems; and that to cure yourself, you need only change yourself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy to imagine that your problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on their surroundings. The fact is, you are so far formed by your surroundings, that your state of harmony depends entirely on your harmony with your surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help you come to life. Others make it very difficult. (pp. 105-106, edited by me from third into second person voice) Building designed by Alexander within Eishen Campus in Japan This next quote changed my whole approach to design: This [approach to design] is a differentiating process. It views design as a sequence of acts of complexification; structure is injected into the whole by operating on the whole and crinkling it, not by adding little parts to one another. In the process of differentiation, the whole gives birth to its parts: the parts appear as folds in a cloth of three dimensional space which is gradually crinkled. The form of the whole, and the parts, come into being simultaneously. The image of the differentiating process is the growth of an embryo. It starts as a single cell. The cell grows into a ball of cells. Then, through a series of differentiations, each building on the last, the structure becomes more and more complex, until a finished human being is formed. The first thing that happens is that this ball gets an inside, a middle layer, and an outside: the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm, which will later turn into skeleton, flesh, and skin, respectively. Then this ball of cells with three layers gets an axis. The axis is laid down in the endoderm, and will become the spine of the finished person. Then this ball, with an axis, gets a head at one end. Later, the secondary structures, eyes, limbs, develop in relation to the spinal axis and the head. And so on. At every stage of development, new structure is laid down, on the basis of the structure which has been laid down so far. The process of development is, in essence, a sequence of operations, each one of which differentiates the structure which has been laid down by the previous operations. … In nature a thing is always born, and developed, as a whole. A baby starts, from the first day of its conception, as a whole, and is a whole, as an embryo, every day until it is born. It is not a sequence of adding parts together, but a whole, which expands, crinkles, differentiates itself. (pp. 368-383) Get rid of the ideas which come into your mind. Get rid of pictures you have seen in magazines, friends’ houses …. Insist on the pattern, and nothing else. The pattern, and the real situation, together, will create the proper form, within your mind, without your trying to do it, if you will allow it to happen. This is the power of the language, and the reason why the language is creative. Your mind is a medium within which the creative spark that jumps between the pattern and the world can happen. You yourself are only the medium for this creative spark , not its originator.” (p. 397) The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book Two: The Process of Creating Life Our current view of architecture rests on too little awareness of becoming as the most essential feature of the building process. Architects are too little concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure) (p. 4) In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment (p. 12) In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form — sometimes startlingly new form — but without ever violating the structure which exists. When this rule is violated, as it was, far too often, in 20th-century development, chaos emerges. A kind of cancer occurs. Harm is done. All in modern society succeeded, in the last century, in creating an ethos where where buildings, plans, objects…are judged only by themselves, and not by the extent to which they enhance and support the world. This means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon. It means that ancient parts of towns and cities have been trampled, because the modernist view saw no need to respect them, to protect them. But even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity which became the norm assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new), and that this is valuable–where in fact it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misapprehension of how things are. Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent within the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as well as in architecture, our most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already. The denial of this point of view, is the chief way in which 20th-century development destroyed the surface of the earth (p. 136) At each stage in its evolution the process — when a living one — always starts from the wholeness as it currently exists at that moment. The work is complete in some respects, in some respects incomplete. At the next moment, we take a new step — introducing one new bit of structure… into the whole. The new structure we introduce may be large, medium, or tiny… But the point is that at every stage of every life-creating process, the new bit of structure which is injected to transform and further differentiate the previously existing wholeness, will always extend, enhance, intensify the structure of the previous wholeness… (p. 216) The enigma is that something new, unique, previously unseen — even innovative and astonishing — arises from the extent to which we are able to attend to what is there, and able to derive what is required from what is actually there… and that all this, then, will lead to astonishing surprises (p. 340) In each place, a being slowly emerges from the mist (p. 340) Intellect is too crude a net to catch the whole (p. 388) A shot of Eishen Campus in Japan – Alexander’s largest project The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book Three: A Vision of a Living World Life in nature, and in the humanly constructed world, is generated by a process of unfolding in which living structure grows in stepwise fashion from a current condition (the system of centers which exists) and takes on greater life by a series of structure-preserving transformations, or adaptations (p. 2) I propose then, that the world should be created by adaptive processes which act as nature does, itself. They allow us to create a harmonious whole that embraces nature and creates buildings, streets, and towns, in a fashion which has the same deep structure as nature, and has the same deep effect on us as a result (p. 3) What is the character of the kind of world where we experience emotional possession of the places we are in? It is a world in which the fine adaptation between people and their buildings and gardens and streets is so subtle, goes so deeply to the core of human experience, that the people who then live and work and play in that environment feel as if they belong there, as if it belongs to them, as if they are part of it, as if, like an old shoe, it is completely and utterly theirs (p. 43) My aim for the last few decades has been, through the use of living process, to construct a situation in our world where a deep, profound belonging can exist and does exist. (p. 43) Living process in a garden depends on people following their own hearts, allowing the call of their own hearts, dreams, feeling, to become actual in that place (p. 235) In a section entitled positive space in gardens: Then we build structures in these outdoor areas to differentiate them further, into smaller living centers, animated by the structures – steps, walls, parapets, railings, seats, embankments, bridges, slopes.. that we build in them. And then we allow natural life to rip loose, the plants, the grass, the trees, the bushes — and let these form still further centers, which then animate the positive space even further. That will happen almost of its own accord, if the initial positive space has been correctly made. This is the form the living process takes, in making a garden (p. 243) If a dynamic process is followed, so that each time the next step follows existing things — preserves the structure, and creates and maintains relationships — we get a harmonious living community. If, instead, a static master-plan-based approach is followed, and the 20 or 100 things are built according to the original drawing or plan, then they will exist, for the most part, without real functional relationships: the whole is unrelated in its internal elements; there has been no structure-preserving going on, step after step, and the whole remains dead (p. 336) Here are a few photos from I mention in the episode to accompany a quote from Grabow, Stephen. Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture. Oriel Press, 1983. I haven’t yet written out here. Some Videos Now for a few youtube videos of Alexander. https://youtu.be/NAjz0INs3Lc Note I particularly love this moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHb9-Y9r_E Chris speaks to the birth of the pattern language idea… https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA https://youtu.be/oKO3vYjZbcs “Really one of the very largest problems that is facing the earth just now is rarely mentioned, and that is the spread of ugliness” Some Links PatternLanguage.com – The most developed and resource website I know of that Alexander was directly involved in Christopher Alexander’s Neglected Challenge to Permaculture – the first time I publicly applied Alexander’s ideas to permaculture Living Design Process – The emerging hub for one particular development of Alexander’s living process approach Building Beauty – Alexander-Inspired education run by a bunch of fine folk who knew and worked alongside Alexander Rob Hopkins interview with Alexander – well worth a read. Please submit other relevant links in the comments below. Some Closing Words I wrote these lines maybe five or six years ago. They feel appropriate to share here now. Where did living design process start for me? Well, one image jumps to mind, so I’ll run with that. It is January, 2014. I’m standing next to my mother on lush, green grass. We’re looking across her new vegetable garden. After almost ten years as a professional permaculture design consultant, this job had been different. The writings of Christopher Alexander had been on my radar for some years, with a small but significant influence on my design practice. In particular, in a passage from The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander had helped me move away from seeing sound design as an effectively mechanical process of assembling elements into whole systems. I was now seeing sound design as an organic process of unfolding parts from within the fabric of an already-existing whole system. But on this project, I had somehow completed a multi-year, slow-motion jump from the former to the latter way of viewing and practicing design. Indeed, during the process, I had entered and started applying ideas from Alexander’s later writings. After devouring his 2012 book Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth I dove into his four-volume, 2000-page masterwork The Nature of Order (2002). Back to my mother and I, standing there. Surveying her freshly planted garden beds. She asked what I was up to. For in my hands I held open Book Two of The Nature of Order. I had just a few minutes prior read Alexander making an intriguing claim. He proposed that if one was to design and create using the living process he has been developing throughout his 60-year career, the result will be infused with fifteen specific properties. Fifteen properties Alexander claims are characteristic, definitive even, of what he calls living structure. Living structure is another way of saying stuff that is as fitted to its context as almost anything we consider part of nature (a tree, for instance, or a jellyfish, wave, or rock). The properties have names like strong centers, levels of scale, gradients, alternating repetition, and echoes. It is for another time and place to list or explain them all (go read his books!). The point here is simply that they exist, and that Alexander claims if you go about creating something in the way he advocates, it will have many if not all these properties in it. The moment I read this I walked over to the garden, my mother joining me, curious to see what I up to. “Let’s settle this right now, Christopher!” I was thinking. I hadn’t been aware of the 15 properties during the process of designing and building the garden. As for my co-designers, mum and dad, they had barely even heard of Alexander. And yet as process facilitator I had been keeping us as true as I knew to the living process Alexander says will reliably birth these fifteen properties into the world. Being true to the process means that we had been consciously engaging our whole body-minds in letting the parts of the garden emerge from within the context of the whole space as we laid it out and shaped it up. It was a golden opportunity to empirically test his contention. I remember my spine tingling as I looked from the list of properties on the open page to the garden and back again. Every property was there. I say it again. Every property was there. That moment is as good a moment as any to nominate as the moment that living process, and what we’re now calling living design process, really took root in my soul. I thank you, Christopher Alexander for, in your beautiful writings, helping germinate the seed that lies inside us all. Dan Palmer Endnote: For me, the creation and ongoing development of Living Design Process is the primary way I am keeping Alexander’s extraordinary legacy alive in the world. Learn more about it here and sign up for the first ever online course about it here.

In this episode in was my pleasure to get to know permaculture consultant Eliosa Lewis from New Climate Culture. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Eloisa’s journey and work and look forward to having her back. Here is a link to Kevin Bayuk of Project Drawdown that Eloisa speaks so highly of. Here is the crypto token She talks about: https://icube.finance I look forward to your comments (including questions for future conversations with Eloisa) and at the start I mention online events on Holistic Decision Making and Living Design Process you can find out more about here.

In this episode I re-release an interview Millie Haughey recently did with me for her own podcast which is called Unplugged, Tapped In. We explore the idea that most of us are trapped in the all-pervasive cage of mechanical worldview without even realising it and what becomes possible when the cage is seen and the door out is located. This will be a theme of some upcoming writing and solo episodes also. In the intro I mention Millie’s interview with my dear friend and long-term Making Permaculture Stronger collaborator James Andrews. I also mention this episode in which I interviewed the founder of Possibility Management Clinton Callahan (or see as youtube here). During the chat I mention Carol Sanford a fair bit too.

In this episode I share a lovely dialogue with Bill Houghton, a long-term follower and supporter of Making Permaculture Stronger who recently reached out to connect. I love his opener: “I’m just intrigued as hell to know where you’re going man!” Enjoy, and know I am so appreciating the richness of your comments and messages as we navigate this journey together. Bill Houghton

Making Permaculture Stronger’s core focus is regenerating permaculture design process together. By this, I mean the deep and hard work of a) honing in on permaculture’s essential core, and b) sourcing and developing design process understandings from, and in alignment with, that place. A necessary aspect of this work is developing new material (ideas, metaphors, diagrams, examples, practices etc). An equally necessary aspect is making space for this new material by finding and letting go of material that does not align or belong. I believe this work is like an acupuncture point essential to the development of permaculture’s radical, needed and enormous potential. I also believe that this work, which is ours, as permaculturalists, to do, has barely begun. This series of three blog posts and corresponding podcast episodes is a heart-felt invitation into this kind of work. Where I want to be clear for you, and in within myself, that I am not writing this stuff as any kind of expert or person-with-the-answers. While I have a couple of tentative conclusions and perspectives, I mainly have a wealth of questions and a passionate commitment to create and hold spaces inside of which this kind of work can happen. So, let the experiment begin. This series was prompted by the appearance of an exciting new book into the literature of permaculture design. Its title is Building your Permaculture Property, its authors permaculture teachers and designers Rob Avis, Michelle Avis, and Takota Coen (who is also a commercial farmer). The book lays out a clear and comprehensive approach to permaculture design process. A process the authors have developed over decades of combined practical experience, both personal and professional. I celebrate the existence of this book and all the hard-won learning that has gone into it. Furthermore, I believe this book is a profound contribution to exactly the kind of work I have just been describing.1 It is also true that when I initially flipped through it, I felt some big feelings. Feelings that are informing and energising my effort to write these posts. Feelings that part of my current experiment involves me sharing openly here. I felt JOY in the sheer existence of this heart-felt, earnest attempt to advance the clarity and rigour of permaculture design. This work is so needed and such a gaping hole in permaculture that these three wonderful humans have done their very best to help fill. I am still feeling really happy about this as I am at the obvious extent of collaboration between the authors whose different strengths flow into and make the book so much better than any one of them could have made it. I felt ANGER to note a disconnect between the presentation of design process in the book and the design process developments and dialogues I have been involved in though Making Permaculture Stronger. From my perspective seemingly fertile opportunities for cross-pollination have not happened, where, to come to the point, the book includes much material that I have poured a lot of my life-force into arguing does not belong in, or do justice to, permaculture’s design process potential.2 While this anger has since mostly receded, it is still there also. I felt SAD to reflect on the resulting prognosis for permaculture’s evolution, if there are not established systems for pooling and collaboratively crash-testing and co-developing our mutual advances. If every design process book lays out its own take largely in isolation from a larger field of collaborative development. I felt AFRAID, considering my impression of the disconnect, how I might channel these feelings toward engaging with the authors about their work in a positive, constructive way. Afraid of how gaps I perceive between our perspectives might be bridged without bridges being burned! I feel this fear still. Finally, I felt a different kind of ANGER in seeing what seemed to me to be a profusion of superficial endorsements of the book (including my own!) that did not show any depth of engagement with its ideas. This sort of superficial blanket praise appears to be the norm in permaculture and I’m concerned what that means for permaculture’s capacity to be in the game of evolution. If it is all “your ideas are great and my ideas are great and we’re all on the same page, hoorah for permaculture” when, let’s face it, at least some of our ideas aren’t that great and, if you actually open the book, we are not all on the exact same page!! Well this is a first for Making Permaculture Stronger, publicly sharing my feelings ahead of my thoughts. Indeed, in the last few months I have had to do a lot of work on myself to get to the point where I am capable of bringing the energy I want to bring to this whole engagement. I feel like I am there, and I can now do this, so long as I keep a close eye on myself as I go along. Let us see how we go. Maybe you can keep a close eye on me also and enlighten me when I get off track. To recap something I said above but now in relation to this specific book, I want to stress that: This is nothing to do with who is wrong and who is right This is everything to do with inviting the authors and anyone in the entire permaculture community into a different kind of dialogue where the aim is that all parties grow and develop This dialogue requires that we find civil and constructive ways of not brushing over but diving directly into our differences in design process understandings, in a way that lets us come through these into the realm of fresh insights and discoveries Okay, enough pretext, feelings included. Let us dive into the first of three talking points arising for me as I engage with this wonderful contribution to permaculture’s evolution. Talking Point One – Worldviews and Metaphors While I am no expert in either worldviews or metaphors, together I find them such an interesting and important topic. In particular, I am fascinated by the metaphors3 we use when trying to make permaculture design accessible. Initially to ourselves. Then to others. Aside from the specific idea or process we use a particular metaphor to convey, we can zoom out and pay attention to the kinds or categories of metaphor we use. These kinds or categories I find powerful windows into the worldview we literally view the world from and through. We can then ask whether the worldview we are working from is the best suited to the context of its application. Where, as soon as the worldview changes, the (downstream)4 metaphors all change too. Before coming back to Building your Permaculture Property, I want to share a distinction between two of the various worldviews available to us.5 I will call these a mechanical or mechanistic worldview and a living worldview. Again, I am sharing my limited current understanding here, where I invite crash testing and clarification of everything I say. Mechanistic Worldview In this worldview we view things as if they were mechanisms or machines. As makes sense when working with a clock, computer, or billiard table, this worldview has us break things down into their component parts, examine these parts in isolation, then reassemble them to build up an understanding of the whole.6 Our modern lives are throughly infused with machines that were built by assembling mass produced near-identical components. Most of us interface directly with hundreds (and indirectly with hundreds of thousands) of machines every day. As I understand it, the mechanistic worldview appropriate to understanding and working with these machines has become our default way of seeing almost everything.7 It is fascinating to me how a certain subset of objects (machines) have emerged from within the living processes of Earth (including those subprocesses we call human) and we have then separated out the machines to hold them up as an interpretive lens to understand the life forces that birthed them! Even though I’ve been aware of the mechanistic world view for a while, it is still deeply embedded within me, where I have observed a strong bias toward identifying the relevant parts within any situation and then assembling or reassembling them into more functional configurations. Living Worldview In a living worldview, things are seen as alive and as ebbing and flowing organisms (rather than dead machines). Rather than treating wholes as if they were entities assembled from pre-existing parts, a living worldview sees such ‘parts’ as organs which have unfolded or emerged from pre-existing wholes, as the feet and lungs of a frog have emerged from the growth of the frog as a whole. Here we cannot separate out the different parts, or organs, without killing the frog (or whatever it is). Instead, the approach to understanding is immersing in the living complexity of the whole and gradually developing an affinity or kinship with it. As I see it, such a living worldview has more affinity with any indigenous worldview or way of life than does the mechanistic worldview. Which One is Right? While I’m sure we can agree they are different, neither a mechanistic or living worldview is inherently right or wrong. They both have their place and their value. If we are designing or building or operating or fixing a machine, a mechanistic worldview makes more sense than a living worldview. If, by contrast, we are engaging with a plant, child, or ecology, a living worldview will likely serve us better than a mechanistic one. It is a matter of evolving our capacity to pay attention to and then engage with the worldview most appropriate to the context in which we are working.8 By its nature, permaculture must engage with both worldviews. It deals with both living beings (such as trees) and with machines (such as bulldozers). The question is at what levels and in what situations is each worldview most appropriate? Metaphors I now want to suggest a hypothesis: The worldview we are operating from will unconsciously dictate the metaphors we choose to communicate our ideas. If we are operating from a mechanistic worldview, our metaphors will be sourced from the world of machines. If we are operating from a living worldview, our metaphors will be sourced from the world of life. Again, I welcome any and all perspectives on this hypothesis. The Metaphors in Building your Permaculture Property Let us now consider the choice of metaphors in Building Your Permaculture Property, asking: Are they sourced from the world of machines (and hence, if the hypothesis holds, from a mechanistic worldview) or from the world of life (and hence a living worldview)? To what extent is that worldview the best suited to the context of its application? I’ll mention first that in the book’s treatment of design process, I found a clear example of a metaphor sourced from the living world being used to shed light on the dynamics of healthy design process. In the author’s words: Figure 2.3 shows how a watershed gathers individual drops of water into larger and larger channels starting with raindrops, then sheet flow, before going to rills, runnels, creeks, streams, and then the river, until eventually ending in a delta at the edge of a lake or ocean. The diagnosis and design steps function in the same way. In Step 2: Diagnose, our goal is to create a filestream (pun intended), with the function of converting the torrential downpour of information into appropriately compartmentalized physical or digital file folders. These file folders serve the same function as dams, swales, subsoiling, and gabions to channel and store information into appropriate steam tributaries that correspond to the eleven property resources. image source Once these eleven tributaries begin filling with information, they will inevitably flow downstream and deposit themselves as design ideas that start with broad brushstrokes down to minute details, or what David Holmgren refers to as “design from patterns to details.” The way that I like to think about this analogy is that the river is diagnosis and the delta is design (more on design in the next chapter). As soon as I started to mimic the dendritic branching pattern of a watershed to gather and distribute information, my obsession about learning everything there was to know about permaculture vanished. I stopped bingeing on information memorization. This was because I started to notice that the amount of information falling into the catchment of my mind, just like the amount of precipitation falling in a watershed, can exceed the capacity of the filestream or water channels. And when this happened, it was inevitable that the flow of data or rain would burst its banks and flood onto my physical or digital desktop as unfiled resources. In other words, information, no matter how good the quality, is only as good as your ability to put it to productive use. That being said, you don’t want a drought of information either, because the speed and quality of your design insights are directly proportional to the quantity and quality of your data; poor information yields poor design. You don’t want torrential downpours of data; you want a slow and steady drizzle that keeps pace with the evolution of your filestream. You will also find that just as an older watershed that contains high-carbon soils and deep-rooted vegetation can handle more rain and even the occasional flash flood, a more established filestream can better slow, spread, and sink the occasional higher flows of information. Building Your Permaculture Property, pages 83-84 This is a great example. The authors are using something from the living world (a watershed) to ‘shed’ light on an aspect of permaculture design process. Without getting into any further details,9 according to my earlier logic, this suggests that the authors are, at least in part, oriented toward, and operating from a living world view. I say “at least in part,” given that the majority of additional metaphors illustrated in the book are mechanical in nature. Whether one domino hitting another (p. 3), navigating through a field of landmines (p. 61), disarming bombs (p. 63), directing a small ball through a maze using pullies and dials (p. 88), operating a pinball machine (p. 132), or shooting birdshot, buckshot, or a slug through a shotgun or using a bazooka (p. 142), mechanical/machine metaphors are used repeatedly to explain core ideas and aspects of permaculture design process. The two most central metaphors used to illustrate the dynamics of permaculture design process as understood by the authors are a ball-in-the-maze machine and a pinball machine: Image Source Image source I want to note here that this tendency to pull in machine metaphors when sharing about permaculture design is in no way unique in the permaculture literature.10 I also want to emphasise that in my opinion, all these mechanical metaphors are used brilliantly to make their target points with clarity. Yet, if what I shared above is valid, the predominance of mechanical metaphors indicates that, despite clear indications of a living world view in the living metaphor I shared, the centre of gravity of the book is a mechanistic worldview and its associated mechanical metaphors. As I emphasised earlier, there is nothing wrong with this worldview when used in its relevant context of application – namely the world of machines. However, it is my sense that the relevant context for permaculture design process as a whole is not the world of machines, but is the world of life. Or, at the very least, I feel it would be a worthwhile experiment to try and articulate permaculture design process from within a living worldview, using mostly if not entirely living metaphors. Which brings me to a set of questions around my first talking point: I find it interesting that in permaculture we surprisingly often use machine examples to understand non-machine processes, don’t you? As permaculture designers, teachers and authors, how much attention are we paying to the metaphors (and similes, analogies etc) we use? How much attention ought we be paying to the metaphors we use? Do the metaphors we choose flow from and hence reveal the worldview we default to? What do you think about this? What do you feel about this? Does this stuff even matter? Is it possible to make the points we want to make in a permaculture design context using living metaphors? Is our audience so deeply steeped in the mechanistic worldview (and the techno-sphere it has enabled) that we must prioritise machine metaphors in order to stay accessible? I’d be curious to hear how these questions land for you, and I am grateful to Rob, Takota and Michelle for inadvertently prompting me to ask them. Please talk to me in the comments below or by sending me a message. We’ll look at another core pattern in the book, and raise an associated talking point, in Part Two. Acknowledgements Thanks to Takota Coen for reviewing a draft and making suggestions that helped me more accurately represent the book (which is not to say I’ve succeeded!), Jon Buttery and Beck Rafferty from the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community for their suggestions and James Andrews for helping me clean up the overall energy of this piece. Endnotes

In a world first for this project, this episode shares one of last year’s sessions with the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community. Huge thanks to Han Kortekaas, Ronella Gomez, Nicholas Franz, Zola Rose, Barry Gibson, Jon Buttery, Arthur Buitelaar, Dan Milne, Byron Birss & Joel Mortimer for co-creating this with me and for their gracious permission to share here. Here are some of us during a more recent session. Learn more about the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community here. Below is the section on systems thinking in the book Practical Permaculture by Jessi Bloom & Dave Boehnlein (p. 18) that is mentioned during this episode. This section is viewable as a free preview at google books. Similarly, you can also check out page 20 of Toby Hemenway’s The Permaculture City here if you like. From Practical Permaculture by Jessi Bloom & Dave Boehnlein

It was my pleasure to yarn with Sand Talk author Tyson Yunkaporta on permaculture and much else. Tyson’s perspective complements and contrasts with that of Leah Penniman in the last episode. Please do tell me what you got from the chat in the comments below! Tyson Yunkaporta Permaculture isn’t a form of gardening – it’s a method of inquiry about relationships – that’s all it is. And it’s awesome and in that way it’s similar to traditional ecological knowledge from all over the planet and it’s a constantly shifting evolving body of knowledge too, that’s never the same in the same place twice. Love it! Tyson Yunkaporta The above quote comes from this talk between Tyson and my friends at the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance: https://youtu.be/61XN9_uILpU?t=3543 Also a big shout out to my my three friends Woody, Meg and Patrick who make up Artist as Family who Tyson speaks about in the yarn. Coincidentally Woody is to appear in our upcoming documentary film about reading landscape. To learn more about that project visit the website www.ReadingLandscape.org and either subscribe to the newsletter or donate to get invited to a free project zoom call on July 15, 2021, with David Holmgren, filmmaker Dave Meagher, and myself.

In this conversation, which follows on from the previous episode, explores Looby Macnamara’s design web. We dive into the topic of emergent design process, and in particular Looby’s design web approach to designing anything. I was pleasantly surprised to discover in my preparations for this chat that Looby is a co-traveller in the realm of design process innovation, earnestly striving via the design web to get free of traps such as: Viewing design process as a linear sequence of steps The logical fallacy of having “design” be one of the steps within the whole “design” process Having observation as a step as if at some point you stop observing Getting too prescriptive about the end state you are heading toward Separating planning from action in ways that cripple the possibility of the best outcomes and discoveries Getting paralysed by complexity Getting stuck in one’s head Mechanical (as opposed to biological and ecological) metaphors Learn more about Looby’s work including books and courses at her Cultural Emergence site here. Also if you’re keen to have Looby support you / us in applying the design web to something in our own lives, make a comment below and if there is enough interest and enthusiasm we’ll make it so! Here is the design web: Looby Macnamara’s Design Web Here is a juicy quote I pulled out from Looby’s latest book Cultural Emergence: The Design Web is a non-linear process with non-linear outcomes and possibilities. Emergent design reflects the flexibility and unexpectedness of Cultural Emergence. It allows for solutions to emerge that take the design in a new direction. It is organic, responsive, adaptive, fluid, flowing and dynamic. As the design emerges we continue to weave our way between the anchor points. An attitude of emergence enables us to flow and move with what is arising. It recognises that things are not always as they seem, there is more to discover and be revealed. The process is alchemical with surprises along the way. Designing regenerative cultures is an ongoing process of emergence, not a permanent destination. We are designing for and with living systems that are organic, dynamic and unpredictable. We are setting direction and intentions. It is an invitation for change, rather than being exact or prescriptive. Looby Macnamara in Cultural Emergence

I recently enjoyed the first of what I hope will be many lovely conversations with Takota Coen about permaculture’s potential. Takota is co-author of the new design process book Building Your Permaculture Property. In Takota’s words, we “talk about how a lack of a living, adaptive process is holding permaculture back from reaching its fullest potential, and what we can all do about it.” Here’s the youtube version, here’s Takota’s podcast where this chat was originally shared, and you can learn more about what I’m calling Living Design Process here. Enjoy and please do leave a comment sharing what you make of the stuff we explore! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIJvfkdsxQA Dan and Takota mid-chat

Hey all. So I had the urge to surf along a little in the wake of the last episode, and reflect further on Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration. Thus, in this episode I reflect on, unpack and further explore what Carol shared about the seven first principles and how they are enriching my own development. My intention for the episode was: I am continuing to explore Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration… in a way that supports listeners (and myself!) to better grasp and go experiment with them… so that we realising together, any value they can bring to our lives, projects and the Making Permaculture Stronger journey. Hope you enjoy and I look forward to hearing what you make of all this in the comments :-). Further Reading, Watching, and Listening on Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration If, like me, you’re itching to dive deeper, I found this most helpful series of blog posts (and a separate series of short videos) where Carol clarifies: The history and practice of regeneration (or see this video introducing first principles) Identifying and working with wholes not parts (or see video here) Essence (or singularity) (or see video here) Potential (not problems) (or see video here) Development (video only) Nestedness (or see video here) Nodal intervention (or see video here) Fields (video only) Here’s a quote I really liked from the essence post: Looking to existence, writing down our observations or collecting facts, will not reveal singularity. In order to sniff out essence, we must become trackers and look for it in the same way that native peoples follow the traces of animals who have passed by. Essence becomes apparent in the patterns that are specific to a person, those that reveal how they engage with the world, their purpose in life, the unique value they create as the result of their endeavors. The same is true for the essence of any natural system, community, or organization. Carol Sanford Finally, Here’s a 20m video (with poor quality audio but worth it) of Carol talking about what regeneration is. She gets into the Seven First Principles about 10 minutes in.