Human Permaculture and Zone 00

For those who amongst us who aren’t familiar with the Permaculture zone system it goes like this :

The principal is to design a farm or whatever in such a way that everything that needs frequent visits is near the home and those that only need infrequent visits are further away. Things that need me to visit them regularly like the henhouse or things that I need to visit frequently like the dry toilet are near where I live. Things like woodland plantations don’t need visiting everyday and so are further away. It’s not really rocket science but it does help people organise where to place things on a site.

This principle gets translated into a system of zones, zone 1 is an area used intensively and visited each day or several times a day, zone 2 is an area visited a few times each week and so on. Zone 4 is semi-wild and semi-managed and the zone 5s are areas left to natural regeneration.

So good so far and all fairly simple and effective. I analyse an element and then judge in which zone to place it according to the frequency of visits. You do of course have compromises with this, guinea fowl rearing usually means having to visit them each day. There is no way that I will put them near where I live, they are far too noisy. Some people say the same thing of cocks and refuse to have the henhouse near their home.

OK, so now come along some people who want to guild the lily. They add in zone 0 which doesn’t actually need to be defined as such according to the principle above. I’ve learnt to live with it. What really got up my nose and a lot of my Permaculture peers was when someone invented zone 00. This, apparently, is the space inside our heads, spirituality, beliefs, desires, ambitions and whatever. Our point was that it’s nonsense to try and extend the zone system to include things which simply don’t have their place in it. The things mentioned above may well have their place in an overall Permaculture design, or not, but they have nothing to do with the zone system.

To make matters worse some well-meaning people decided that we needed ‘Human Permaculture’. There are now books on the subject and people run courses explaining all about it. There is even one guy who calls himself the ‘Father of human Permaculture.’

Let us take a moment to observe some ants, they settle in and get on with their lives and soon become a new part of the ecosystem, rats, foxes, birds, same thing. They don’t actually need to study Permaculture design before setting themselves up. Permaculture wasn’t designed for them, it’s for us, the incredibly intelligent human beings who set stuff up that causes a mess for all forms of life, us included. We cut down forests and then plough the fields, we build cities which aren’t in anyway adapted to our psychological and physical needs. All that just so I can point out that ‘Human Permaculture’ is a tautology, it’s like saying something like ‘an egg omelette’.

I wasted some time looking at what the people running courses on Human Permaculture are proposing. Some of the stuff is OK, it corresponds a bit to what I present when talking about ‘care for people’ which is one of our ethics. The rest of it was ‘one size fits all’ approaches to how people should live together, how they should make decisions and how they should behave. There is no ‘one size fits all’ system, technique nor whatever that works. It’s like saying that ALL projects need swales. I had the experience once of designing a project, the couple had seen a few films on Youtube about Permaculture and really, really wanted some swales. They were disappointed when I didn’t design any in, I told them that it would be silly to put swales on the narrow terrasses that covered the land that they had purchased.

I work with people who have herds of cows, if I want to design a system adapted to cows I need to know quite a lot about them, same thing for hens, ducks, sheep, fish or whatever. I want to design systems that are, as near as possible, similar to the ones to which the animals are evolved. When it comes to human beings I need to know shed-loads of stuff about the Human as an animal. This means studying things like anthropology, paleo-anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, economics, architecture, governance, social biology, human history and so on. It doesn’t mean that doing an ecstatic dance or sticking some crystal up my nose will help me design human appropriate systems that sit in harmony with what people call ‘the natural world’. I need solid information about the animal and it’s different cultures. This is the art and science of ‘peoplecare’.

During the time I wasted observing the Human Permaculture thing ‘course leaders’ I noticed a distinct lack of knowledge of any of the things I just mentioned. Now, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do what they are doing, I am saying that they shouldn’t call it Permaculture because it isn’t.

Professional Permaculture designers are serious people, fun too of course. We seek to transform our current agricultural, economic, construction and social systems into ones which care for the Earth and care for people. We spend a lot of time learning about, testing and inventing new techniques and strategies, we follow scientific research and explore traditional practices. Getting the message through that we are highly competent designers and engineers who can transform farms, businesses, villages and towns is hampered by well-meaning people distorting what Permaculture is really about.

I had an experience recently with a person who has set up a very ambitious project. The objective is to create 30 community led gardens tied together in a network of mutual aid and support. One of the partners was a small project run by people who base themselves on what they call ‘human Permaculture’. Because of some strange behaviour from her ‘human Permaculture’ partners, said person came to have a very low opinion about what Permaculture is and what it can do. She decided to follow a course that I led and discovered that Permaculture wasn’t about circle dancing and tree-hugging nor was it about sociocracy and meditation. Good things in their place but they aren’t, in themselves, Permaculture. It maybe that a design will include a meditation and circle dance space, it maybe that the people involved with a project want base their governance on sociocracy, OK. But the design will also deal with food production, business plans, water management, energy use and production and so on.

Doing some ‘work’ on oneself is crucial for a Permaculture designer. I need to know a bit about myself, I don’t want to project my character traits onto a design nor the people for whom I am designing. Am I more conservative or more progressive? Am I more risk adverse or more of a risk taker? How good is my capacity to be able to see things from someone else’s point of view?. Same with clients, I need to know quite a lot about them and their personalities. It’s all about caring for people.

Permaculture design courses often bring up a lot of emotions for participants, positive news can do that. We have to design our courses to acknowledge this. People tell me that this is where ‘human’ Permaculture comes in, for us it’s plain and simple caring for people. We don't need another name and we don’t need one-size-fits-all mono-cultural approaches as each case is unique.

The techniques we need to transform our societies are there and within our grasp. Those we need to care for people exist too and in general a design always takes both into consideration. Designing a good production system means ensuring that the system improves biodiversity, it builds soil, Earth care, and produces food of high nutritional quality, People care. It also means that the system is adapted to the competences and physical capacities of those who run it. People care again.

In a world faced with so many crises, in a world where we have a design and engineering approach that can help us go a long way in sorting them out it is crucial that people understand what Permaculture is and how to use it. Trying to find a market niche by distorting something that works just fine and inventing something like ‘human Permaculture’ is really not helpful. I would suggest that these people call their thing something else and stop free-riding something so important to the future of humanity.