Permaculture can be a tricky thing to wrap your head around as it can be so broadly applied - in this series, let me explain it to you via the 12 Permaculture Design Principles that underpin much of the ‘how’ of integrating permaculture into your life. If you want to read an overview of what Permaculture is first, head to this post below, then come back to deepen into it.
Permaculture Design Principles
Fundamentally, Permaculture has a foundation in systems ecology and encourages you to think holistically when designing or problem-solving. This type of design is all about ‘systems thinking’ - you consider things from a broader perspective and look at overall patterns and interactions between elements, rather than just individual elements in isolation from one another.
The 12 Permaculture Design Principles I’m focusing on here have been developed by David Holmgren, one of the co-founders of Permaculture.
While these Permaculture Design Principles have been developed from the perspective of designing a permaculture garden or landscape, they can easily be applied to designing any system where there are elements that interact with each other - like a work team, a town plan, a weekly schedule, how & where you store things in your home… anything that could do with some cohesive structure.
I hope that by simplifying Permaculture and giving you some solid, no-frills examples you’ll be inspired to look at your world a little differently, and maybe to bring in a touch of ‘Permaculture flavour’ to how you do things!
Permaculture Design Principle #1, Observe and Interact
“A process of continuous observation in order to recognise patterns and appreciate details is the foundation of all understanding.”
David Holmgren, Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability.
Observe and Interact is the Permaculture Design Principle that I feel has had the greatest impact on how I apply permaculture to my garden and home. Permaculture is all about the connections and interactions between things, whether different elements in a garden or a team in a workplace, and this is really at the crux of this first Principle - it asks you to take note first, implement second.
Principle 1 encourages you to take the time to actively watch and analyse a situation before you make any changes. When you jump in and immediately get to work changing something, fixing something or building something, you can miss out on the subtle relationships between elements in your system. These initial observations can take time and patience, but this stage of ‘reading between the lines’ and subsequent critical thinking and analysis provides valuable information that can lead to much better outcomes.
Side note: observing can be active or passive - active observation in your garden might include things like taking note of where the sun and shade fall at different times of day, what type of soil you have, where the wind blows the strongest, patches of lawn that don't grow so well, areas where water pools every time it rains - tangible, concrete observations made at defined points in time.
Passive observation can be simply noticing things, particularly over a longer period of time. For example, in the six years we've lived here, I've noticed a certain type of migratory bird arrive in early summer each year - its distinctive call always announces that summer is here, regardless of the date. Other examples could be noticing when the autumn leaves first start turning, or when the spring winds arrive to announce the weather is changing, or that the plants infested with aphids last week are now a breeding ground for ladybugs (yes!). Still solid observations, but more fluid.
It’s worth mentioning that just because this is the first design principle, it doesn’t mean you apply it once at the start of a process and then you’re done, on to the next one. This is ‘systems thinking’ - you might need to come back to consider if what you’ve chosen to do is working as well as it should (Observe), or if the change has had an unintended effect which will require you to make adjustments or refine the changes (Interact).
The Observe and Interact process
Get clear on what it is you are wanting to change or observe, and why
Consider all the potential options for change, small or large
Choose the option that you feel will be the best/most achievable/most appropriate etc. Remember that often small changes are easier to reverse or pivot from if they end up being the wrong ones!
Implement that change
Return back to observing - did it achieve the desired outcome? What else is different now? How has the change affected other elements in the system? Have there been unexpected positive or negative outcomes?
Make a new choice based on observing the evolving system - every time you make a change, you start from a fresh perspective.
In reality…
Here’s a really simple example of how this might be applied to a garden situation.
You have a pot of herbs, placed by the back door in the shade. The herbs don’t grow much and get kind of yellow, so you move the pot of herbs to by the front door where they get sun for most of the day. The herbs perk up, soon you’re picking herbs for dinner, all is good…then it’s summer, and the herbs don’t look so great anymore, looking kind of sad and limp. You decide to water the pot twice a day, instead of once…the herbs pick up, you’re back to herbs for dinner!
Its common sense right? But if you looked at the herbs dying and just thought ‘oh well, I can’t keep anything alive’ without considering that maybe they just need more sun, you’ve just observed. Nothing changes without the interaction part - and being willing to keep making changes in response to further observation is key.
One final thought and example for you from my own life - ‘Observe and Interact' is the reason I’ve never drawn an actual Permaculture Design for our property.
We purchased our 4 acre block when it was a sea of Lovegrass (a pernicious weed in our parts) up to my armpits. We walked the block cautiously to get a feel for the lay of the land, but it was really guess work and finger-crossing. We could see paths through the grass where the cattle and sheep had been walking (fun fact - did you know that on a slope livestock will almost always choose the easiest path, which is most likely along the contour? This was a nifty observation on our place initially, as it told us a lot about the fall of the land). We could follow the stock paths and be led to a more open, slightly flatter patch of land.
Once we did have the block slashed, we could see that this part was indeed a little flatter and could be suitable to form part of where we might site our house. We walked things out, pegged out markers, drew plans on paper…and then managed to be on site one day when we had very high winds. We walked just slightly down hill from the flatter spot and reached a point where the wind was markedly less than a few meters further up the slope…and this is eventually where the house went. As a result, our little house is much more sheltered from the prevailing wind direction than we would have been had we stuck to the paper plan.
This taught me a very practical lesson - there is little that can beat focused observation over a period of time for gathering information about a system. I decided early on to not draw a solid plan for the development of our garden - instead, I keep a list of elements (plants, structures, animals) that I would love to slot in, and let the natural place for these elements become obvious over time.
If you made it this far - legend! You've just had an introduction to my fav "Observe & Interact". What do you think? Easy? More complex than you expected? Don't feel like you've got the patience for it? Say hi and let me know what you think in the comments section below.