Community Ethics

We talk of intentional communities but it is not enough to be intentional. One must have ethics. It is said that permaculture Ethics include:

Care for the Earth

Care for People

Return the Surplus

Ethics are "rules of behavior based on ideas about what is morally good and bad."

Since permaculture is dealing with Nature the ethics must be natural. From the begining God commanded man to tend to the weightier matters of Nature.

"And the LORD God took the man,
and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." Genesis 2:15

Communities must have ethics as well and many ancient cultures have summarized those rules. The ancient Egyptians had a list of rules which expressed their ethics or law call Maat. The Ten Commandments of Israel were just an abbreviated form of these rules and are still seen over the supreme court of nations as basic and fundamental yet not always applied equally in all things.

While the Law of the Maat was exemplified in 42 Negative Confessions Maat was the spirit in which justice was applied rather than the detailed legalistic exposition of rules. The same is true of the Mosaic Law.

Primary Principles for Functional Design:

   Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.
   Connect. Use relative location: Place elements in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.
   Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hold useful flows. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield, every gradient (in slope, charge, heat, etc.) can produce energy. Re-investing resources builds capacity to capture yet more resources.
   Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Beneficial connections between diverse components create a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
   Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.
   Make the least change for the greatest effect. Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
   Use small scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job, and build on your successes, with variations. Grow by chunking.

Principles for Living and Energy Systems

   Optimize edge. The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system, and is where energy and materials accumulate or are tranformed. Increase or decrease edge as appropriate.
   Collaborate with succession. Systems will evolve over time, often toward greater diversity and productivity. Work with this tendency, and use design to jump-start succession when needed.
   Use biological and renewable resources. Renewable resources (usually living beings and their products) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements.

Attitudes

==Footnotes==