Being a permaculture Designer

If I want to get dry I need to get out of the water, in the same way if I want to achieve health I need to transform my
lifestyle and environment. Surely I owe it to myself and my loved ones to take a longterm approach to my life and the
body that moves me around in it,

Transforming the Whole thing sounds a daunting task including as it necessarily does mind,body,spirit,lifestyle,
companions/family and environment. If we start thinking about health in terms of not just us but also future as yet
unborn generations then setting out on the path of such a transformation would seem to be the only rational choice.

We are lucky, here at the beginning of the 21st century in having a developed system for bringing about such change, it
is called Permaculture Design. A practical system with many skilled Designers working all over the world, with their
help we can create environments and lifestyles whose healthfulness, abundance and creativity is effectively only limited
by our imaginations.

What is a Permaculture Designer?

My job is to study/practice all the time, to fully immerse myself in the 10,000 techniques so I understand them, their
applications, strengths and weaknesses. I seek to master the art of Permaculture Design so that my mastery, like
Occams’ razor, cuts through confusion and I can clearly see the appropriate strategy to apply to a situation.

My study allows my senses to become clear, I see and understand what is actually there, I perceive the strategies applied
by those who came before me, appropriate or not. I listen to the building as I pass from room to room so that from time
to time I hear the bass quiet of harmonious design tied with good choice in building materials.

I meet people to work with them on their life projects and I am quiet in my mind, my personal preferences and favourite
techniques are far away. With this and a certain boldness I and the clients unfold from their knowledge, experiences,
material and skills resources, ambitions and delights a pragmatic, straightforward and scheduled design.

Clutter and poor or no design mean confusion, pollution, waste, noise, illness and disease. The bits of ones life lie
scattered around in haphazard and ineffective disorder. Design assembles the 1000 things of ones life into an
interconnected whole which is rich, diverse and productive, we speak often of harmony, harmony has a sound and good
design leads to a complex system which has an altogether different tone to complicatedness.

As a designer I constantly repeat that it is actually very, very easy to sort out all the problems and difficulties we see
around us and live in each day, it is we who are making things difficult and complicated, a good Permaculture Designer
can help us organise everything; building, garden, business, toilet, lifestyle and dreams into a whole.

What is a Permaculture?

As a noun and vision.

A fully established functioning permaculture would essentially be the antithesis of virtually everything we see and the
way we understand things to be. Abundance not scarcity, creativity not destruction, complexity not complicatedness,
interconnectedness not alienation, wholeness not fragmentation, true health not disease. Picture, if you will, the sound
of a Zen mediation garden with the productivity of a forest, with homes and livings that sit quietly in their edible
landscape and all Designed to minimise work and maximise creativity and all with the dynamic stability of a Tai Chi
master in movement.

As a verb and process.

As clients we work with a Permaculture Designer along a way which will make clear our aspirations, strengths and
weaknesses, our needs and burdens. Our designer will work with us to ensure that each aspiration we claim to, each
dream we feel we have are true desires, we will work to ensure that there are no hidden desires and that the vision we
develop will be wholehearted.

We will take stock all of our physical and financial assets, our relationships and personal networks, in short our
resources.

Now, working closely with our Designer we start to assemble everything into a mosaic, the edges of each piece have a
positive relationship with the edges they meet so a complex web of interdependancies is formed. The mosaic changes
and dances through time, when we see a gap we see an opportunity for more productvity, the plants in the winter are not
the same as in the summer, our personal needs change over the year. Our Designer will lead us through the golden rules
of permaculture design which are drawn from the heart of natural systems and in which we can trust and which will
enable us to draw out the techniques appropriate to us and our place; straw bale building or stone, coppice orchard or
forest garden, vegetable garden, bio-gas or wind turbine, business from home or separate?

We will set out a schedule, what, where, when, who. Each day we will get up knowing what needs doing and the
ordering of the schedule will mean that works are done in the correct and work minimising order. The new-build home
will be started with its foundations but perhaps before that we will buy in or make the lime putty for the walls so that it
is well matured and ready for use when needed.

Then, with the design done, the work schedule ready, the appropriate course to learn specific techniques completed all
that is left to do is install it all. The work itself deepening our understandings, filling out our experience.

As a designer in the process I remain clear and open, faithful to the mix of ethics, principles and approaches which
make Permaculture Design unique and effective. Some are laid out below. I make sure that the designees are fully
steeped in them. I work to make the process fun and creative for all involved all the time intervening as little as possible
and making sure that anything I do contribute is effective and appropriate. Perhaps I will have knowledge of some
technique which is unknown to the designees and which would fit in very happily, as I explain it I take the opportunity
to illuminate further the art of design showing how this technique makes the whole more harmonious and productive.

Where a group of people set out to create a permaculture they will effectively be making a corner of the world a very
agreeable place to visit so the contact over the subsequent years between myself and the team will be a benefit and
pleasure to all concerned;

I will have learnt a great deal and my art will have been enriched in the process.

Some basics

Earthcare, look after the earth, creation is much more interesting than destruction;
Peoplecare, look after people, myself included, enriched and creative people are fun to be around.
Set limits consumption and give away our surplus, even with the abundance of a mature system, moderation is good
practice and we can use surpluses of time, energy, food, materials to help others design and set up their plots.

Everything we install should connect up to other elements, pond/marsh area cleaning grey water and giving pleasure,
pest predators and nitrogen rich matter for the vegetable garden.

Everything should serve more than one function, well thought out selection and placement can mean that our element
we want to install serves many functions. A compost heat gives compost, a bio-gas system gives compost plus gas for
cooking, hot water, electricity.

Every important function should be supported by more than one element, more than one way of heating our homes
should one system fail, more than one way of lighting, a polyculture in the garden rather than a monocrop.

And much much more

Its actually all very easy and simple.

Steve Read (Dip Perm Des)