Ethics

What are ethics?

Ethics is based on well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues.

Permaculture names three main ethics:

1. Earth Care.

2. People Care.

3. the Return of Surplus

There are many forms of surplus. The return really comes back to the first ethic. We have to care for the earth and its living systems and non-living systems, and we have to care for people. Really, we are the only element left that can care for the earth. Scientists believe that the earth now would collapse, even if you remove man from earth. We've gone over that point.

This does not need to scare us. Rather, we can see this as a turning point at which we must face that the only thing now that can repair the systems of earth and get them back into good health are ourselves. And guess what. There are plenty of us, and more of us every day. Like many things in the natural environment, we can either be a negative element, or a very, very positive element.

We continue to behave in an incredibly negative way, and a more negative way all the time. Hopefully, this is becoming more obvious, especially in the information age where information is available to us all at any time. With good design and good thoughtful application, we can be incredibly positive elements. So, rather than looking like the final plague, which seems to be where we are headed currently, we could be the absolute saving grace of all systems.

It's a matter of not passively observing ecology as it's usually written as "passive observations of what happens out there in the environment". It's really a matter of getting some direction and finding a directive to act, and that's what permaculture gives you. Permaculture gives you a designed system, a tool kit to act in a positive way, to be part of creation. You should not be embarrassed or feel like you need permission to be part of creation or act as the creator, as the speciator, as the enricher of systems.

It's handy to know that if you can get your own needs, your own house, your own garden, and some of your own food supplies sorted out for yourself, you can work out why your house is so expensive to run or costs so much energy. You can work out your energy audit, and by starting to provide just a bit of your own food you can start to move from your present comfort zone of high energy consumption to one that has less consuming and has more of a friendly footprint.

In the PDC you can easily start to understand how you can do that anywhere in the world, and how you can help other people move in that same direction. So, we really do need to at least practice getting our own systems and our own gardens in order. It can be your own garden, a community garden, or other people's gardens. We need to get our own house in order and get some understanding of these systems.

Furthermore, we need actual practice! It won't work if we just work from a theoretical base. Get involved and extend the systems out to other people and eventually, you can go anywhere in the world and work in all sorts of climates. A confusing thing about the Permaculture Designer's Manual can be that its a book written for all climates, including many landscape profiles and landscape forms. Also, you must know exactly which landscape you're in and which climate you're in before you can design accurately.

Credits: Geoff Lawton.