Permaculture Design Basics: Observe and Reflect

Permaculture design is founded on the basis of 12 key design principles (See What is Permaculture for a full list). No matter where you are in life, what resources you have available, and what lifestyle you live, these 12 design principles provide a framework for solving problems, working with nature, and creating spaces that are resilient and adaptive. In this series, I will go through each of the 12 permaculture design principles, explain what they mean, and share some ideas about how they can be applied to someone beginning a permaculture journey while living in a rented apartment. Check in over the coming weeks to learn about each of the principles and gain new ways of thinking about the spaces you create, wherever you might live!

Permaculture Design Principle 1 – Observe and Reflect

American Culture and the Value of Patience

American culture values action. We idolize the hero who shoots first and asks questions later, and anyone who isn’t in constant pursuit of changing and improving his life is either lazy or ignorant. This value system often de-prioritizes patience and can encourage us to take bold, decisive action before we fully understand a situation, with the assumption that we will figure things out as we move forward.

While there are benefits to courageous and decisive action in the right contexts, the first principle of permaculture design challenges us to look at things differently. More specifically, it encourages us to simply look at things and wait. This first principle of permaculture design is simply to observe and reflect on the patterns within a system before you ever start trying to change things. I’ve heard it said that in a perfect world a permaculture designer would spend an entire year simply observing a site before making any plans at all about what to do with it, let alone starting to dig things up. This might sound like a radical concept and a waste of precious time, but there is a simple and elegant logic to this mode of interacting with the world, whether you’re growing a garden or modifying your lifestyle.

Working With Time vs. Working Against Time

In permaculture, we seek to develop a permanent culture (hence the name of the entire design philosophy). This idea of permanence is intrinsically linked to the progression of time, and it requires us to understand a system not just in a single moment, but rather how that system flows and shifts with the changing of the seasons. If you’re dealing with the static, artificially imposed systems that dominate our culture, it’s tempting to take a quick survey of the most obvious factors and then immediately set about imposing your will on the environment. The downside to this approach is that you’ll inevitably end up working against rather than working with it.

For example, if you’re putting in a parking lot you might measure the tilt of the land, look up some data about rainfall and drainage, and consider where people will be walking. With these factors in mind, you bring in a bulldozer and a steamroller and get to work. The result is a patch of asphalt that serves a single purpose throughout the year: it’s a place to park cars. However, this parking lot has a few crucial flaws when we look at things from the perspective of permaculture. For starters, it doesn’t catch and store energy (permaculture design principle #2) and it doesn’t allow for any diversity or stacking of functions (permaculture design principle #10). More than that, however, it’s not permanent. Given enough time, the asphalt parking lot will only deteriorate and decay. This is because its design failed to plan for and work with the passage of time. When we design for a single moment, time will always become an enemy.

Contrast this with a permaculture food forest, which works with the natural progression of a forest ecosystem to produce an abundant landscape that only becomes more and more productive as years go by, even with minimal human intervention. Creating a food forest is only possible, however, when one understands the way that energy and matter flow through a system over time. Observing a site throughout time and noting its natural tendencies so that we can work with them is one of our most powerful tools in allowing us to build anti-fragile systems that grow in beauty, utility, and resiliency as the years pass.

The Skill of Observation and Reflection

So what are you supposed to actually do while practicing observation and reflection? For me, this design principle holds similarities to meditation and mindfulness practices. The skill here is to simply be present in the moment and take note of what occurs in whatever system you are observing when you’re not doing anything to change it. You don’t want to fixate on any particular event, but rather sit back, observe any patterns that present themselves to you, store those patterns away for future consideration, and then just go back to waiting and watching.

What things enter the system naturally, and what things leave the system? Where does the majority of activity take place, and what areas are utilized more infrequently? Identify the multiple functions that each element in the system serves, and take note of redundancies and how they build resiliency. The more you can learn about what wants to happen naturally, you can make tiny, subtle shifts in a system that work with the natural flow, potentially yielding huge benefits with minimal effort.

Observation and Reflection in an Apartment

It’s one thing to imagine sitting back and observing a field or a forest: watching the comings and going of different animals through the season, noticing how rain flows across the site, identifying the plants that grow naturally, and so on. But how does that apply to practicing permaculture while living in an apartment?

Noticing without Judging

It turns out that the practice of observation and reflection is not that different whether you’re observing an entire ecosystem or simply the flow of people and items through your kitchen. Before you try to make any massive lifestyle shifts, go 100% waste free, or even just start a recycling habit, I would encourage you to take some time to simply be mindful of what you’re doing right now. What kind of products are you buying? What kind of waste are you producing? How much electricity do you use, and where do you spend most of your time in your house?

If you haven’t put much thought into sustainability in the past and you’ve only recently started considering these issues, you might find yourself feeling guilty or ashamed of your behavior and feel the need to change everything about how you live all at once. Though this motivation comes from a good place, I would encourage you to take a breath, take some time, and just watch yourself as you go through your life without any judgement of what you’re doing “wrong.” The fact of the matter is that you’ve been doing the best that you know how to do up until this point, and the journey towards a permaculture lifestyle is a lifelong journey, not a sprint.

Remember that the need to take immediate and decisive action to correct any perceived wrongdoings is a byproduct of our culture, but time has proven that patient observation and reflection empowers us to make better long-term decisions. You don’t necessarily need to watch your patterns of behavior over an entire year before acting (though you can if you want to), but taking a month to develop the practice of noting the patterns in your own home can be the difference between sustainable, lifelong change and burning out after a few weeks of trying to force massive change on yourself all at once.

Permaculture and Pareto’s Principle

If you want to discover the most effective way to make changes in your life, use your practice of observation and reflection to watch for opportunities to apply Pareto’s Principle. This is a principle that states that, for many events, about 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. For instance, if you were running a business, you might find that 80% of your sales originate from 20% of your customer base. I believe that the same idea applies to sustainability and permaculture design. If you have the discipline to observe your actions, you’ll likely find that 80% of your negative environmental impact comes from 20% of your actions. Maybe 80% of your weekly waste comes from the 20% of your budget that you spend on groceries (if this is the case, you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of items in your trash can are coming from food wrappers and takeout boxes). Alternately, you might find that most of your electricity use comes from running your air conditioner, and that powering your lights only plays a small role in your overall power consumption.

These observations reveal the most impactful points for you to begin making changes to your lifestyle if you want to be more sustainable. For instance, if you find that most of your garbage is coming from grocery packaging, you might decide to make the change to shopping for unwrapped produce using a reusable bag the next time you go to the store. This singular action might have the same impact on your trash output that starting a composting program, separating your recycling, and creating an upcycled art project would all have combined. That’s not to say that those other endeavors aren’t worthwhile, but if you only have time and energy in your life to make a single change, you’re going to want to know how to apply that energy most wisely. The practice of observation and reflection offers a unique opportunity to spot these patterns that are hiding in plain site.

Tying it All Together

It’s not always easy to take a back seat and let life run its course when you notice something that can be improved. Cultural messages will constantly push you to take action now, whether you fully understand the situation or not. However, give nature some credit for being stronger and wiser than you think, and develop the humility to realize that your first ideas and impressions about a situation might not always be your best. Give yourself the time to learn and understand before acting, and you’ll find that time works with you, while those around you struggle with spreading themselves too thinly and wasting energy. The first principle of permaculture design is simple and straightforward, but that doesn’t make it easy. Take notes of your habits today, and the rest of the permaculture design principles will only become more powerful in your hands!