Permaculture ethics, a game changer
Why Permaculture is the tool we need today and Sam Vimes too.
Fukuoka, natural farming …. game changer
Yeomans, holistic farm design… ditto
Jeavons, producing food in tiny spaces …. same
Alexander and Co … pattern language building design … ditto
Douglas & Hart …. agroforestry …. same
A whole bunch of other people!
Then came along Mollison and Holmgren and the former in his book “Permaculture” put an ethical base to a holistic design approach.
I’ve taught Permaculture design to a lot of people, thousands over the years and all over the world. Over that time I have evolved how it all gets presented yet something has always stayed, the Permaculture ethics get presented towards the beginning.
Why is that? Because they underly what we can and can’t do. Because they are guides that help us decide which techniques, materials, strategies we can adopt and use. Perhaps most importantly because Permaculture is about total social reconstruction and these ethics help guide that evolution. In the vision of the future world that Permaculture designers see, all our systems care for the Earth and for people. It’s simple and of course complex, understanding and adopting these ethics changes everything. Much of what we see today will simply be unimaginable in this future ethical and equitable world. For example:
Shoddy
What a great word to describe so much of what is produced by the unethical agents of neoliberal capitalism.
Shoddy means badly and carelessly made, using low quality materials, or showing little respect, thought, or care.
Ring some bells? One of the inexorable creeping cancers of neoliberal capitalism is the decline in quality of the products we get sold. Everything; food, clothes, machines, tools, houses …. Beyond built-in obsolesence we’ve got built in poor quality. Scandal after scandal and yet we keep on buying the stuff, everybody heard about and experienced built-in obsolesence but there weren’t any riots in the streets, no mass protests. Yet we were and are being cheated. It’s a form of poverty and economists picked up on Terry Pratchett’s character to formulate Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness. People in poverty have to buy cheap and and shoddy goods that don’t last very long. This means they have to frequently re-purchase such goods, in the medium or longterm this works out as much more expensive than buying a quality good that will last.
One generation grows up with consumer goods and sees them decline in quality. The next generation starts from that low point and sees that as normal and then watches the quality decline, and so on to the next generation.
Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit? ("Let a purchaser beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of the nature of the property which he is buying from another party.") In this age where stuff is imported from the the other side of the planet? Asymmetry of information, the economists call it, a producer is fully informed as to how their products are made, from what resources and by whom. They know about the negative externalities of their production, pollution, waste, child labour, shoody goods etc. The consumers are well outside of this information loop which is why it’s decribed as asymmetric. The best a consumer can do is check other consumers feedback, look for relevant articles in magazines like Which? or just wait for a scandal to unfold. Most people don’t bother, they take the risk without thinking about it and hope for the best. The greater the distance between a consumer and the producer the harder it is to get real information about the product. Said distance is useful to producers who can produce how they want knowing that disgruntled consumers aren’t going to come knocking.
We can but wonder how this sort of thing is possible, that there are people who deliberately design and produce low quality products designed to fail fast. We can ask ourselves how it’s possible that some producers are willing to cut costs by using child or forced labour? How is it even possible that our favourite high street shops sell shoddy products made by unpaid or poorly paid bonded labour in sweatshops?
Shoddy new built housing as an example
The lack of accountability provided by the distance between producer and consumer is part of the answer to the above question but how could it explain badly built new housing? A house costs a lot of money and yet many new houses are full of defects.
This is just one of many, many videos about the quality of UK new build housing. A quick search and you can find similar stuff for other countries.
At the end of 2023 the average UK house price was £285,000.
On average, the generally expected and acceptable lifespan of a home should last at least 60 years. This means that these expensive houses which people wish to turn into homes are designed to fail after around 60 years. If indeed they last that long. Think of Sam Vimes’s boots, his wife (in the books) is very rich and inherited many of her clothes, shoes and houses from her ancestors. They had money and bought good quality stuff. A wealthy person today can afford to hire an architect, good builders, quality materials. Their house will last a whole lot longer than 60 years and will be passed on from generation to generation.
Most new and retrofitted buildings use much more energy than predicted by computer models at design stage, up to 250% more, the so-called ‘energy performance gap’. Field testing has shown that fabric heat losses can be between 50% and 60% more than design predictions. This means that the people making these houses their homes have much higher heating bills than they should. The houses were designed to perform well but got badly built. Some of the people who built your home cut corners and then presumably went back to their place and slept soundly.
You would think that paying such a lot for a house would head in the opposite direction to the Sam Vimes theory, but no. Shoddy and expensive. The last UK governments didn’t really help with the price business, for some reason basic economic theory passed them by when they introduced ‘help to buy’ (no interest for 5 years then low interest equity loans). This despite warning from economists who pointed out that if you inject money into a market that has supply difficulties … you get demand-pull inflation.
In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, the "big three" housebuilders that dominate the new-build market in Britain have been able to increase their profits without significantly increasing the number of homes they build
Keep housing as a scarce resource by not building to demand and keep prices high. The Government injects cash which flows along to the building companies shareholders, who would have thought? A lot of people who pointed out that this is what would happen.
As an aside a lot of this sort of stuff feels similar to gangster money laundering. Is it a form of tax revenue laundering? Money flows from our pockets to the Government who, time after time, develop policies that flow this money onto people who already have enough. People tell me it’s because the politicians are stupid. My reply is that if someone was so stupid and so often it’s very hard to see who they’ve managed to live to adulthood (adulthood in this case meaning an age at which they can reproduce, not meaning an age at which wisdom starts.
Major house builders have stocks of land, built up over years, that they release slowly for building. This means that they have another way of maintaining high demand and thus high prices, they restrict the amount of land they use from their stocks.
In 2021 first-time buyer mortgage payments represented 39 percent of take-home pay, in London and the south of England, it represents 66 and 47 percent of pay. That seems a lot.
Would it be possible to design ‘shoddy’ out of a system?
Of course it is, we replace anti-social life destroying practices with ethical life enhancing ones. A supply chain is only as good as it’s least ethical link. Your new built home contains thousands of different products coming from dozens of different industries. For the most part these producers are far far away, few of these producers have a vested interest in producing quality products.
At a mini farm I designed the people produce fruit and vegetables which are transformed into the meals presented in their little restaurant. There are two ethical nodes, the producer and the chef. The first could go and buy cheap non-organic products and pass them off as ‘home’ produced organic ones. The chef could ignore basic kitchen hygene and cut corners with the cooking itself. Or, by taking ‘care for the Earth and people’ seriously, do the opposite. Which is the case.
This short and local supply chain means that if anyone got sick eating at the restaurant or discovered that the fruit and veg were bought in can come back and complain. They can also spread the word which would be catastrophic for the farm business.
A long supply chain means more ethical nodes, each one a bifurcation point, towards quality ethical products or towards shoddy rubbish.
An unethical choice made at a bifurcation point can lead to an unethical cascade. Faced with using a poor quality product it may be impossible for a workperson to do a good job. Rather than incur an added cost the workperson uses it anyway and so on along the supply and production chain
As for housing so for clothing. Most of us wear stylish plastic bags, modern clothing uses a lot of petrol based fibre products such as nylon, polyester, lycra etc. The clothing isn’t made to last, it’s designed to wear out fast, it’s stylish but shoddy.
If we want to get serious about sorting out our different crises we must transition our economic systems away from producing shoddy products towards more localised ones that produce goods that use resources, manufacturing and supply techniques that care for the Earth and people.
The architect Walter Segal, for one, showed that it’s possible for local people to build good quality and energy efficient homes. Thousands of people have used his approach and have built homes that aren’t full of flaws and defects.
Two stories came in whilst I was researching and writing this article.
A director of a social housing company told be about how some local people fought for two years to stop social housing being built around their homes. In the end they took the land owner up the pub and convinced him to sell them the land. They used it to extend their gardens. Not a lot of people care happening there. Strangely enough the social housing company builds high quality and energy efficient homes, in virtually every case they are much better designed and built than the neighbouring industry built ones. Perhaps those local people who fought against the social housing were simply jealous?
The other story appeared in the Guardian newspaper. ‘Dixon, 53, and Lee, 59, had not owned a property before, and bought their home, in an estate called Lucerne Fields, using, in part, almost £55,000 borrowed through the government’s help-to-buy scheme’….. ‘The property, which they bought from the Barratt Developments subsidiary David Wilson Homes for £274,995, was valued last year by independent chartered surveyors at £1 after a catalogue of major defects emerged. The surveyors said that without the problems, it would have been worth £330,000’.
An architect that I admire is Diébédo Francis Kéré. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. What did he do? He basically did what any architect should do, he designed high quality buildings that are passively adapted to the climate and to the people who use the buildings. Winning the award only makes sense in a world where most architects do the opposite.
It is possible to build homes for colder climates that only need a boost of heating from time to time. Homes that are designed to be passively adapted to the climate, ones where people don’t have to pose the question ‘eat or heat’.
Let’s get ethical and start really looking after the Earth and it’s people.