The Life Web

There are two primary criteria. "Everything is connected to everything else". Some major elements like trees have some 500 living connections... and "Every function is supported by many elements, and every element should serve many function". So, this is how we supply the needs and how we use the products of elements we include in design, and we start to make up that Life Web. When you put down a diverse mixture of elements, it's not just the diversity for diversity's sake. That's kind of like putting penguins and polar bears with elephants and giraffes and cactuses, and a whole mixture of diversity for diversity's sake doesn't do much at all.

All energy starts off with the sun, and all energy eventually sinks out of a system. So we know that there is a source and there is a sink. The question is, how long can we trap the energy in between the two? The connections, or functional relationship between the elements, of such a systems is what's important, not the individual elements so much. Permaculture is a connecting system between disciplines itself. It's how you connect the house to the garden, and the garden to the economy, and the waste system in the house to the garden, and the animal systems. It's how you connect the water in from the landscape, it's the connections between the elements that also gives you the stability.

So you start to look at how many different connections we can make to make that safety net, and if we get a good enough net together, sixty percent of these connections can break and we'll still produce! In a fishing net, sixty percent of the strands can break and it'll still catch fish. This is a web of connections between elements and how they interact. It's not like an industrial agriculture system which has the same source of origin, comes through one element alone, and often has one big sink out at the bottom. If anything breaks here, it's like fishing with a rotten line, and once the line break you're not fishing anymore.

In our web of connections, we can afford for quite a few connections to break and its quite a dynamic system. It's very much how ecosystems work and we can actually follow the path of energy through and it might bounce through connecting to many elements and just before it sinks, via a small interaction, you can sometimes send that energy back through the life web before it comes back out again. Via good design and application,  you can rebound it just by the way you play with the design, because you're the orchestrator of that design, and it can be something quite simple. You might just have a system up on some sort of slope and you've decided to catch the water in swales.

When the top swales are full, they overflow down to another swale, and once this is full it drops down into another swale. These drop offs allow the water to take a really slow, long path through your designed area. Eventually the water we've trapped will drop off and drop out of the property. Until it sinks out, it was contained energy - we've contained it and can therefore put it to some use - and then it sinked out, and it's lost to us. It had contained energy and we lost it. This is Entropy. It was water that did contain energy while it was on our property and we lost it out the bottom.

Energy is constant and entropy is constantly increasing. It's the mist on the mountain forrest that drips down and becomes part of the mountain stream which eventually gets down to the ocean, and its contained energy is lost at sea level. That's entropy. It's the heat and smoke and puff of energy that comes out of your car exhaust that contained the energy that exploded in the car engine that drove the car along. It had contained energy. At the moment it leaves the car exhaust that energy is dissipated into the atmosphere. It's the raindrop falling on the mountain, which comes all the way through the stream-river system, and hits sea level. It no longer contains any energy. It's kind of a weird thing, entropy. It's har dot think about. It's about energy, not about life. Life is anti-entropic.

As water goes downhill off the mountain and comes down into the ocean, at the top the water contains a lot of energy, but not a lot of life. As it comes down it gains life and loses energy, and when it has nearly lost all of its energy at the bottom, down at the estuaries and tropical mangroves - the richest systems on earth - its richest in life, but it has the least amount of energy. So you could say that life is anti-entropic. It's just an interesting way to think. When you're desinging systems, you're always trying to trap energy and gain life.

Let's get back to our little design here. We design this set of swales to trap the water, and the trees we plant along those swales will take up that water and soak it into the landscape, and you’ll harvest it as mango juice later on. We’ve then trapped it as long term energy stores, but we can never trap it all. When a big rain hits us, water overflows the whole system and goes out the bottom. So to improve this system a little bit, we put an animal house at the top end of the top swale, and this animal house drops manure into the top swale. Once this swale floods, it now floods ‘manure tea’, or manure diluted by the water spread evenly along the swale. The swale overflows into the next swales, and the same thing happens. You just have to position it right and this process will happen on its own.

Eventually, the energy is lost as the water sinks out the bottom, but if just before it exits the property you interrupt it with a silt trap pond, something interesting takes place. You might fill it full of gravel and plant reeds that have anaerobic roots. These take out most, but not all, of the suspended nutrients in the water which results in rampantly growing reeds which clean up the water before it sinks out of your system and heads to your neighbors. The bodies of the reeds take out a lot of the diluted manure before the energy is lost. Every few months, you can then come along, as the orchestrator of the system, and cut those reeds. You might even have to pull some out in order to thin it out a bit so that the "gravel reed bed silt trap pond" doesn’t clog up. You then take those up top to the animal house, either as bedding, as a mulch yard, or even as an edible to certain animals.

You see what just happened there? As a designer, you just sent some of that energy back through the life web. You interrupted the near lost energy and tripped the energy back through your system. So, you don’t have to do a lot there. All the elements do the work for you. The trees take up the water, the swales sock the water into the landscape. Once the swales have been constructed there’s really very little equipment needed, and irrigation systems are very simple. This system is earth soaking, contour soaking, the animals system works just fine up there, but here is the cracker. YOU had to position them there. YOU had to position the swales. YOU had to position the reed beds, and then you had a little bit of work to do every few months to go and cut the reed beds and bring it back up to the top of the hill. But if you do not do that design, if you do not do that positioning, and if you do not make those connections, it won’t happen on its own.

It is the patterns of connections between elements that we are talking about, and the assembly of elements so they interact together. Also, when choosing elements, there are criteria for choosing them. Normally, a simple way we think of elements are; Animals, Plants, Structures. Each element that we choose should have at least three uses. You may actually make a list of all the animals, plants and structures you're going to inlude in the design, and actually list the 3 uses. It may just be a way to think about it. You have to think quite naturally about it. Most trees are quite easy to find three uses for. 

The next criteria is Visits Per Year. This gives us 'placement', or 'zoning'. It's really an energy-efficient placement, and it sounds quite simplistic, but when you get on the ground it's not quite that simple.

Read more about Zoning in an upcoming post!