Holmgren’s Design Principles (8m 28s)

In a moment, I’ll list the original 12 permaculture design principles, created by David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture. These are the same principles outlined in his book Principles and Pathways (www.permacultureprinciples.com). These have been the foundation principles of permaculture. I think these principles are great design tools and are very useful when planning, thinking about, and working on a piece of land.

I thought it would be easier for people to identify what this field is all about if we set measurable goals as they relate to each area of permaculture. The principles provided in these videos provide more of a template for what people could expect to find when looking at a permaculture site. What is permaculture? This is permaculture. This kind of thing…

As you design and install elements at your site, apply David Holmgren’s twelve permaculture principles to determine the most effective solutions. There is also a ukelele album called ‘The Formidable Food Sound System”, which is this guy who made songs for each of these principles. It’s nice music.

Okay, so I’ll go through each of them and provide a few examples:

The first principle,

  • Observe and Interact

This is a good thing to do when first walking on to about a new piece of land or really doing anything. Especially when you first walk on to your site. You first just walk around, quietly, look up in the trees, look down at the ground, look straight ahead, what kind of stuff is there, just observe…

That’s the first principle, the second is,

  • Catch and store energy

Water tank is one, solar panel is another, our muscle stores energy as well.

Third

  • Obtain a yield

We want to have a yield whether this is a physical yield in terms of food, or something to show for our progress for the last 10 minutes, or 5 minutes, we want something that comes from our labor and our time. To have those, it gives us these nice little psychological boost throughout the day, throughout the project or whatever we’re working on.

  • Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This is a tough one in practice I think, self-regulation. Feedback is always good. Our peers, or the people closest to us, physically, often offer the greatest advice and sometimes the most painful to have to listen to.

  • Use and value resources and services, renewable, renewable energy let’s go for it. We’re looking for regenerative systems, and things that will continue to put back and looking for these resources and services is good.
  • Produce no waste. This is also the principles of the sanitation chapter. Watch what comes in and nothing should go out. We should be able to take care of all of our own garbage. I don’t think it takes up that much space and by looking at it and having it there you’re aware of what you’re producing and how you can cut it down as well.
  • Design from pattern to detail. I really like this principle, this is the zooming one. Imagine standing where you are, then zooming out, way out in Google, out out into space, then pause and reverse and zoom back in, zoom in to the country, to the region, to the neighborhood, to the house, to the backyard where you’re standing there, staring at the space between finger prints and observing the slight friction made from the ridges when you rub your index finger with your thumb. We need to keep our mind agile. Be flexible. Observe everything. Try to be aware of everything. And we can do that by changing the scope, by changing our where our zoom is, where is our focus… and it could be between our finger prints, it could be in a 1 meter space in front of our face, or it could be further out. Constantly changing, this is how we keep ourselves honest, and objective on what we’re doing and we get to the point of what we’re doing a lot faster and easier.
  • Integrate rather than segregate. We divide to unite. We don’t need to divide things anymore. Now is when we integrate and we can integrate with all the other people we’ve been segregated from, on a cultural scale and also on a smaller more site-wide permaculture scale.
  • Use small and slow solutions. Tortoise and the hare. This isn’t a race. Take the long way and do an awesome job. And be patient. Patience is a good quality to have, everything takes time, and we have time.
  • Use and value diversity. We’ll talk about tree guilds and plant guilds. Having 7 support species around 1 plant is a way to strengthen each of the plants, some plants attract insects, some attract cover the ground, some plants pull nitrogen up from the soil. Every plant has a unique contribution it can bring to a guild and by having that diversity there, it builds a well rounded space, that can enable plants to grow.
  • Use edges and natural patterns. The edge effect is an ecological concept that describes how there is greater diversity of life in the region where the edges of two adjacent ecosystems overlap such as land and water, or forest and grassland. There is more life on the edge, speaking metaphorically and of course physically as well. A few examples, if you look between the rocks and the soil there’s always a bunch of bacteria and fungi that grow, bark marks the edge of a tree, an estuary where freshwater meets saltwater, it’s billowing out into the ocean. I’ve always thought, beaches, just a beach. Our attraction to the beach as humans is an example of edge effect. We just like to go there, why because it’s on the edge. I can go in the water, now im in the water, now I’m out of the water, in the water, out of the water. The soil line is an example we’ll talk about, it’s a line that separates the space above the soil which is what we know and the space below the soil, which is where all the microorganisms and things live. Our skin, another skin of edge effect, it’s what defines the limits of our body. A border dispute is another example of edge. We have borders, borders that line our property. And really, we often rarely even go to the border. We just know that it’s there. We don’t really care about it but because it’s the edge, it matters.

There’s also something called edge detection, as Terrance McKenna calls it. He says we have these senses that whenever our security is being breached or when a predator is approaching us, we sense that. And that’s this edge detection, we’re always ready to defend or to strike because nature can sense a threat and that threat can more or less be an edge.

It’s a vague concept. I think it’s interesting to keep in mind as we walk around our site and observe things that happen, these sorts of things come up.

  • And the last principle, is creatively use and respond to change. I think this one is that… we always have to be adapting and adaptable, there are different people we’re working with all the time. There’s nothing constant, everything is changing, especially on a permaculture site where we’re trying to do all these creative things with a group of people, some you know, some you don’t, there’s always so many chaotic things happening, I think we just need to be creative, respond to these changes, we can be flexible we can work with all the changes happening and usually come out with something that’s different but better than we originally intended.

So these are David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles. Use them, think about them, have them sort of mull around in your head. They make for good conversation when you’re talking to somebody else, when you observe things and when you see things that come up.

Great. That concludes this video and thank you for your time.