So here ends our exploration of Holgrem’s 12 Permaculture principles, and how they can apply to the world of organisations and management.
They have proven highly useful and creative as a bridge between natural ecosystems and human, socio-systems; indeed, permaculture being a nature-inspired design system, it creates a ‘space for thinking’ about how Nature operates (after 3,8 billion years of trying and testing various possibilities and keeping only the ones that do work), and therefore how we could seek inspiration from Her to design and run our human organisations.
Permaculture is not limited to these 12 principles, and the wisdom we can seek from Nature is not limited to permaculture either. So, beyond the 12 principles themselves, it is perhaps therefore this underlying disposition of turning to Nature to seek inspiration that is most important in the journey we have travelled through Holgrem’s framework.
Indeed, as these 12 reflections come to an end, I remain in awe at how Nature seems to display with such grace and ease what we humans are yearning, but so often failing, to achieve: effortless self-organisation, generative diversity, abundant production, zero waste, and, ultimately, the conditions for more life.
Another one of my fascinations is that, whilst systemic thinking is gaining some momentum, we are still, as humans, struggling to apply it, caught up as we are in what seems like an inescapable analytic, ergo reductionist approach to reality – and perhaps thinking itself is the root cause of our conundrum. But Nature doesn’t think, She simply is – and because She is systemic by nature, turning to her for inspiration can help us bypass our over-developed analytical brain and free us up to feel, imagine, and dream up new ways of creating our human realities in systemic ways that our rational intelligence – however useful it might be in other situations – could not help us access. I remember reading somewhere: “What the mind separates, the heart makes whole”… so let us connect to Nature wholeheartedly.
Another couple of my takeaways before closing down this series:
One thing is the issue of efficiency, even more so since it has become such an obsession with modern organisations. What Permaculture, and Nature more broadly, teach us is that what matters when we address the issue of efficiency is the lens through which we are looking at reality. Most of the time, we are only looking at parts of the system, wondering if this part, or that part, is efficient – when it is the whole system we should be looking at.
For example, the main narrative we are hearing about food production is that intensive agriculture is the only way to feed 8 billion people, and that it is much more efficient to concentrate fields in the hands of a few farmers, so that they can buy big machinery that will help them grow more tons of their crop per hectare. Here the lens narrows down to focus on tons per hectare as the criteria for efficiency.
If we zoom out and explore the issue of efficiency at the level of the whole system, then other elements need to be brought into the equation: how much imported inputs (water, energy, pesticides and fertilisers to name but a few) did it require to produce these tons per hectare, compared to what other, less “hungry” crops, might have required? And the management of their “collateral effects” (water treatment for polluted water tables, deadly emissions from overgrown seaweed, soil run-off, etc.), how is that factored into the claim for efficiency? Zooming out even more: this food production is part of a system that throws away between 30 to 40% of the food produced? Which means (and here I must thank my friend Julien Dossier for enlightening me on this point) that not only 30-40% of the food is thrown away, but also that 30-40% of the water, chemical, and land used could have been spared. How efficient is that?
Let’s zoom out even more, and make links with my second – and most favourite! – takeaway: 1 element, several functions, 1 function several elements (this, in my mind, should have been Holmgren’s 13th principle, given how profound it is). A gigantic field overseen by a farmer with his big machine only produces huge amounts of the same crop per hectare: 1 element, 1 function. And when that field is hit by drought, or storms, there is no plan B: 1 function, 1 element.
In contrast, smaller, organic set-ups do much more than just producing food: they produce employment, enhance bio-diversity, human health, regulate water cycles, and prevent us from having to spend millions in water-treatment factories and public health programmes: 1 element, several functions. And if one of them fails through bad weather conditions or bad land management, chances are that the others will compensate for that drop in production: 1 function, several elements.
So, there we are, we will have to stop this exploration at some point – but let us never cease to be open to the wonders of how Nature operates, and how She can inspire us to build healthy human systems that will create the conditions for more (healthy human) life.
