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Transcript:
Hi, folks. Here I am on this rainy day at my place it's fall here right now, and this is our first big rain, and we're very excited about it. And I wanted to just kind of sit outside in the rain and talk to you all a little bit about the ethics of permaculture.
So traditionally, I mean, let's back up a second because really this whole thing, the whole reason you're here is because you feel an ethic of Earth care, right? You feel like there is a responsibility as a human being to take care of the planet and the species besides ourselves. If you didn't feel that sort of fundamentally in your gut, you probably wouldn't be enrolled in this course. And the ethics of permaculture, permaculture was literally founded as a tradition called permaculture.
The people who started calling it that and started doing these courses were doing so because they really want more people, wanted like we do more people, to really adopt this deep ecological ethic of caring about the planet as much as we care about the people. Officially, the ethics of permaculture are care for the people, care for the Earth. And then the third ethic, which is sort of up for debate because some people say fair share. But then that brings in all this debate about what is fair. Some people say future care, then that brings in all this debate about what about right now. So there's lots of different ways to think about this third ethic.
Bill Morrison wrote about limits to growth and consumption and really talked about thinking about how many children you have. And then that, of course, is a really controversial topic. So what we're asking here is for you to contemplate and to explore this notion of the third ethics, this idea of paying it forward of caring for species other than your own caring for families other than your own or for homesteads other than your own. This notion of sharing and what does it mean to you? And we want you to really think about that and internalize that and to create your own reflection of the third ethic. Then another thing I wanted to mention, our course is sort of known for including a lot of people care, a lot of social permaculture more than typically.
Typically, a permaculture course will sort of touch on the topic for a day or two. But mostly they're focused on essentially landscaping, design, gardening, creating closed loop systems with the agriculture and the food and the energy within your home system. And so in some ways, you could sort of look at the ethics as like there's physical ethics and there's spiritual ethics, and there's emotional ethics. There's lots of different places that you could go with how you're thinking about it. One thing that I have observed is that when I first started learning permaculture and seeing it happen, there was a lot of conversation about people care and people saying oh, we've been focusing so much on Earth care, and we're not focusing enough on people care, and it's part of the work, right? People care is Earth care.
If people have their needs met on at least some fundamental level, they feel empowered to take care of the Earth. If the Earth is taken care of, then the Earth takes care of us. And it all sort of twists around. But what I would assert is that most of Permaculture under that name from the beginning until now has been people care because it's been almost entirely focused on people designing their own place where they live, and then maybe including the needs of other species, but being willing to truncate those needs if my needs were deemed more important in that moment.
And so what I encourage you to at least consider is to rebalance your core fundamental ethics and to really take a deep and hard look at what you're doing and why you're doing it and make sure that Earth care really is happening, not just in a way that benefits you as an individual or brings you social capital or makes you feel better about the damage that you're doing, but in a deeply ethical, fundamentally obligatory way that you connect with and choose to care for the Earth just because she cares for you. So I just want to throw that out there and see what you all think and encourage you to bring your discussions and your reflections. There is no endpoint to this ethical discussion. There's no rules about it. There's no laws. We're not here to tell you how to feel or to tell you what to think. But I am here. My goal in life is to encourage you to consider allowing the needs of other species to be as important as your own, at least some of them, and just to reflect on that and see how that changes the way you're approaching your design here at the beginning of the course.
