The FIRE Path to Financial Freedom (and The Most Important thing We've Learned about Permaculture)

The FIRE Path to Freedom?

(The Most Important thing We’ve Learned about Permaculture)

Well now that’s quite a loaded headline! Clearly, we’re going to talk about money and the current popular “FIRE” (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement - but first! - what is the most important thing we’ve ever learned about Permaculture, homesteading and living with the land? What single concept has had the biggest positive impact on transforming our lives since we first heard the “P word” on WEFT Community Radio back in 2001?

Leverage.

The whole point of the Lillie House project as we originally envisioned it, was to create viral change by helping other people transform their lives, landscapes and society, through better connection with nature, our higher selves and our communities. We wanted to find the actions that would have the biggest effect on changing our own lives and we knew that if we could model beautiful, rich, free ways of living that had a transformational effect on the world around us, then we wouldn’t have to twist people’s arms to create change, they’d line up for it like it’s the new iPhone. 

That’s leverage.

But to do that, we knew we’d have to find a path that was accessible and replicable to as many people as possible. And we knew that path would have to help people be better off, happier and healthier at each step of the way. In Permaculture, which is a system for ecological design, we’d say people have to be able to obtain a yield (Holmgren, Permaculture Principles) from every bit of time, energy and money they invest in their transformational adventure. It’s a goal that’s more often discussed than actually pursued.

And Permaculture also taught us that we’d need to identify the key leverage points where we can get the most positive personal and societal transformation for the least effort. Such leverage points need to be high return on investment (ROI.) We’re looking for actions where we can quickly get 80% of the value from just a 20% improvement (the 80/20 principle.) That way we can make an adventure out of working on improving just one area of our lives for a while, obtain a big lasting yield from it, then move on to invest in other transformational experiences with a high ROI. 

And the very best leverage points stack functions and allow us to “Care for the Earth and Care for People” (Mollison, Holmgren, The Permaculture Designer’s Manual) while simultaneously creating lives for ourselves that are more beautiful, abundant, rich, and free. 

And they have to be fun. It has to be an adventure. 

After 10 years of observation, study and practice, and another 7 dedicated actively trying to figure out the best leverage points, we think we’ve got a good idea about what a dozen of them are and how people can best pursue them. 

Any one of these leverage points will help us build a better life, but when we stack them together, these transformational adventures create a program of study and action that can improve our lives and can make us truly powerful agents of positive change. 

I won’t take the time to go into all 12 in this article, but to understand the principle, here are our top 3 examples with a high personal and social ROI:

1. Basic foraging, because it’s an adventure that transforms “weeds” and “wilds” into beloved friends, and helps us begin to “see nature” and beneficially tend the wilds in our communities.
2. Extensive forms of gardening like natural gardening and forest gardening, because they teach us the most, have the highest ROI, and - unlike some other forms of gardening - they actually benefit biodiversity, clean water, and sequester carbon. And finally,
3. Transforming our relationship with work and money. 

Phew! There’s the money. In journalistic terms that’s called “burying the lead,” but my experience in my community circles of activists, artists, artisans, homesteaders, gardeners and farmers, people just want to learn about pretty new plants and beautiful sustainable gardens while making the world a better place - AND the last thing people ever want to hear about is money. In fact, for many of us, money is a taboo topic, either just too frustrating, or even seen as the “root of all evil” (and not the tasty kind of root, either!)

But quite honestly, transforming our relationship with money is the leverage point that will likely have the most positive impact on us as individuals, on the Earth, and society at large.

(You know we are a beautiful and deeply, ahem, idealistic community when we need to convince ourselves that discussing money might be as important as eating weeds.) 

Perhaps this discomfort with money explains why some of the most deeply beautiful people I know are also in deeply precarious financial positions. 

Perhaps it explains why new farm businesses file bankruptcy at a higher rate than any other business, and even high-profile homesteads and permaculture projects fail at an alarming rate. 

And perhaps it explains why a guy who claims to have eventually worked up to making minimum wage is frequently called “the most successful farmer on the planet.”

And maybe it’s also why people are lining up to pay $1000-3,000 for online classes and “business models” openly claiming to teach how we can make around $3/hour for a whopping $10-15k/ year. Yes, look past the “earn $1,000,000 a year!” headlines and read the fine print that the big bucks are GROSS and the take home is often minimum wage.

What the prospective homesteaders and farmers buying this content really want is a ladder to freedom, a way they can escape the rat race and find a simpler way of life.

In my opinion, these would-be agents of transformative simple living are LITERALLY paying people to teach them how to fail at their goal. The reality is, it doesn’t matter how frugal you are and how much voluntary simplicity and community reliance you cultivate, if you’re planning to make $6/hour working 70 hour weeks, you probably aren’t going to stick with it for long.  

In Permaculture, this approach to “profitable farming” is called a Type 1 error: a system designed to fail. 

But at least those people are taking a stab at their dreams. Many of us are so paralyzed by our frustration with money, that we never figure out how to finance our dreams, or truly commit to taking our first steps. 

And, finally, not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps this resistance to talk about money is why so many of my incredible activist friends remain dependent upon the very same systems that they’re fighting to tear down. 

This is why transforming our relationship with work and money is so important. 

Kim and I think it’s so important that we’ve done workshops and even put together a whole free starter class to get you going. 

But in my classes and workshops, my top recommendation has always been to pick up a copy of Your Money or Your Life. (YMOYL) a guide to achieving financial independence (FI) by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. These days, there’s a whole growing online community devoted to the idea of achieving “FIRE,” Financial Independence, Retire Early. This includes different strategies like Fat FIRE, where you retire with a big play fund, and Lean FIRE, where you retire into relative simple living on a smaller nest egg, and even Barista FIRE, where you continue part-time at Starbucks for insurance and supplemental income.  But still YMOYL sets the standard and focusses on changing our relationship with money. Now, Vicki Robin has a fantastic new edition of YMOYL that is even more compatible with Permaculture. This isn’t just standard retirement advice, it’s a blueprint for changing our lives and our society. In my opinion, it’s a book that should be at the very top of every activist, organizer, homesteader, aspiring farmer, and permaculturists’ reading list. 

In Part 2, I’d like to dig in a little further, introduce a few of the concepts you’ll find in YMOYL, and apply our Permaculture Design. Could  Permaculture FIRE be your path to freedom? 

And if are one of the many Permaculturists who took up the cause after achieving Financial Independence, I would like to hear from you in the comments!

Coming soon, Part 2 Permaculture FIRE or Permaculture FREEdom?

The Most (and Least) Important Tasks for High-Value Gardens (and Farms)

(Draft design sketch for a Habitat for Humanity project.)

Sure, maybe you're willing to put in $30 of cash and work for a single tomato because it's your hobby. But honestly, most people I see start this way end up letting the garden go after a few years because it just isn't worth the time.

From my observations, the people who harvest the most value, satisfaction and, well, produce out of their gardens are those who take gardening seriously. We keep things simple, but we also plan, prioritize and intend to progress over time, becoming better and better growers. Over time, we get better results.

The same is true for those who want to turn their growing into an income through farming. 

One tool we can use to maximize our garden value is the Pareto curve, which shows us 80% of our returns will come from just 20% of our efforts. This is often called the 80/20 principle. Take weeding, for example. The pareto curve implies that 20% of our weeding gives us 80% of our results, yet many gardeners continue weeding to sterile perfection, long past the "point of diminishing returns" where the hours of weeding will have no noticeable results on yields. As it turns out, research on herbicide and pesticide value confirms exactly this!

Over 30-something years spent involved in farming, foraging and gardening, here's my list of the MOST (and Least) Important Tasks for a High-Value Garden or Farm:

----------------------------

The Least Important Garden Tasks:

1. Weeding. Each hour we spend weeding dilutes the real value of our produce, period. Past a point, it has 0 value, yet we slave away (or make the kids do it!) And still, the perfectly, painfully weed-free garden just takes one vacation, bad cold, or family emergency to turn into a weed-covered mess and total loss! I've seen it 1,000,000 times! Yet, you don't have to weed at all to have a good garden....

2. Tilling and digging the soil. It destroys the soil, wastes time and gas, and breaks your back. And yet it is completely unnecessary, in fact -  We haven't tilled or dug in years. 

3. Strimming. Again, unnecessary. Add gas-powered lawn mowing to this list, too.

4. Fall garden clean-up. No value, actually harms garden health. 

5. Fertilizing. Most conventional and even most organic fertilizers have been shown to be completely unnecessary, and even harm long-term soil health. 

6. Most fancy irrigation - especially drip irrigation. While they DO have a place in a smart design, research from multiple sources have been unable to document any value from the time and investment put into fancy irrigation systems. 

7. Most greenhouses. Again, they may have their place in a well-designed system, but it has been difficult for researches to document any good returns on most greenhouse projects. And they're unnecessary for winter produce!

8. Spraying herbicides and pesticides. Just don't do it, ever. Totally counter-productive to a happy and healthy garden. 

9. Cultivating the soil. Again, unnecessary. Haven't done it for 15 years!

The Most Important Garden Tasks:

There's not much in the world I'm certain of, but this list is one thing. Here are the tasks that have unquestionably given us the biggest yields:

1. Day-dreaming in the garden. Specifically, creative daydreaming about issues of design, project vision, and if you're a farmer, branding. This is probably the single effort that has paid me back with the most value. If you don't have a clear vision about what you really WANT out of your landscape, garden or farm, you're extremely unlikely to get it. It's not enough to think: "I'll start a farm = profit!" You need a clear vision of what kind of farm, what kind of garden - and what kind of life you want those to support! Then you can start assessing whether that vision is realistic and making a plan to get where you want to be. For farms, a study from MSU found that one of the biggest determining factors of profitability was the ability to charge a higher rate at market. And that was all about having a compelling vision and brand. 

2. Design. "Permaculture is protracted thought and design, instead of protracted labor." Almost every grunt-work task on the list above can be designed out of a garden! For example, why spend hours per week weeding when you can design a low-weeding or weed-free garden system that will last for years? Why spend time watering, when you can design gardens that water themselves - without expensive, time-consuming irrigation systems! In Permaculture, we use a variety of tools to maximize the design of our own personalized food systems to ensure truly healthy food and gardens that really provide value. To start that adventure yourself, I recommend our Community Supported Permaculture Program. 

3. Planning. Now, this is a research-based approach to a profitable farm and valuable garden. Research from MSU, Vermont and UCLA have all found that one important factor is associated with profitable farms: planning for success. This means creating goals, keeping records and using that feedback to improve over time. Even if you don't want a profitable farm, that becomes key to a valuable, enjoyable garden. But "diminishing returns" applies here, too. You'll get 80% of that value out of a few simple efforts. 

4. Listening to community members (family members) and customers. This is the single thing that transformed our business from a low-impact money-loser to a high-impact profitable business helping real people achieve their goals. Give the people what they want and need. If you're a home gardener, this goes a long way to getting the fam or friends to help out!

5. Investing in community-building. For farmers this is crucial. But for gardeners this is golden, too. The community of gardeners will be your best source of information, seeds, plant material and people to exchange produce with. Community-building is 80% of the point of having a garden. 

6. Education. I grew up gardening and farming, and have apprenticed on a few permie-inspired farms. But taking a Permaculture Design class and really learning my local ecosystem revolutionaized the value I get out of my relationship to the land. Completely worth it. 

8. Nurturing the Soil. Finally, we've come to an actual physical garden task. Each hour you spend mulching, building biodiversity and fertility in the soil will pay you back for years and years to come in better, healthier produce with less work.

7. Nurturing "Systems" and "Regenerative Assets." In Mollisonian Permaculture, "regenerative assets" are those that produce for us and replicate themselves.  When we invest our time into creating and establishing such powerful assets, they to will pay us back for years and years to come. Nurturing a young forest garden, vegetable guild or perennial vegetable patch will take less time than almost any annual garden, yet that investment will produce food for us for decades! Each year, that annual garden will need to be recreated, but the perennial system will keep on producing with minimal effort. And while the annual garden will forever require new seeds, new investments, new energy to create, the perennial systems will actual "reproduce," giving you plant material you can use to spread them further and further, creating more and more valuable perennial systems. Now that's a smart way to spend your time, and a smart way to garden!

8. Observation. Often, we rush to action at the first sight of disease or pest issues, without taking the time to understand the underlying causes, or how the plants and ecosystems might be able to fend better for themselves. Pests are natural! But so are predators, who will eventually show up to reduce pest pressures for us, if we're patient enough to observe how nature works, rather than stepping in at the first sight of trouble. On a different level, observation can show us where appropriate microclimates are what good plant companions or agonists we have growing, or where we need to direct more (or less) water.

So there you have my list. What do you think? What garden tasks do you find most valuable? 

Designing Prosperity, Financial Permaculture and Harvesting Energy

Look at the diversity of life, the wealth and fertility of natural ecosystems, the beauty, the energy, vitality that nature has accumulated, generated and sustained over the ages, through cliamte changes, massive earthquakes and volcanoes, fridged ice ages, meteor collisions... 

For me, the generative power of nature is utterly awe-inspiring, so it was a major relelvation to think that we could harness that power and put it to work creating the kind of life we want to live, by modelling our livelihood on its wise patterns. 

Live in-tune with nature: Transform your life.

Like this:

And we can use models like this to transform life-sucking, decaying, "degenerative" human systems like this:

Into systems that are "regenerative" like natural systems, growing wealthier and healthier over time, like this:

And in so doing, live happier more fulfilled lives.

Two keys to making this transformation are 1) Identifying steams of energy we can catch, and 2) Identifying good places to store those streams of energy so that we can accumulate them.

So lets list a few potential streams of energy for a household economy. And lets be mindful that these same strategies can be used by individuals, families, communities or organizations. 

Conventional Income: These are mainly "financial," meaning they give you energy in the form of money, which is particularly useful in our society. These include jobs, home businesses, inheritance, investment dividends (those these are very rare today) etc. 

Saving: Meaning "not spending." A penny saved is a penny earned. But better, because you don't pay taxes on it. The only problem is that the potential growth of this energy stream is relatively limited and subject to the "law of diminishing returns." This is because in our society, for most people basic costs are somewhat fixed. I know few people who can thrive and create a regenerative, resilient life in North America on much less than $10,000/year.

That means if you start your Permaculture journey with expenses around $50k/year, your potential Return on Investment (ROI) from savings is around $40k. 

Now, if you can put 20 or even 40 hours/week for 1 year into creating hacks, systems or solutions that earn you $40k/year tax-free indefinitely that's a pretty fantastic ROI in anybody's book!

But once you get down to $10k of expenses/year it gets harder to find fat to cut. You could put the same 20 hours/week in and your maximum yearly ROI is probably a few thousand dollars at best. So the ROI of energy and time put into "saving" diminishes as you get better at saving (and as your income goes down.) 

So, the "financial experts" are just being a bunch of clueless, privleged a-holes when they tell a family of 3 making $30k/year that they just need to "save more." People with already low expenses or incomes should put less time and energy into saving and more energy into harvesting more diverse energy streams with a higher ROI. 

And this is why some of the standard advice that many Permaculturists and homesteading experts is misleading, too. 

The practical take-home is that if you're on the top side of that equation with a high potential return, then look for high ROI opportunities to save money, such as low-maintenance edible landscaping, sharing housing expenses, and home energy improvemments. If you're already frugal, maybe it's time to start spending money on things that will generate more energy streams.

Setting Limits: This is Permaculture's original third ethic (it's contantly being changed by everybody) but it's also an important source of energy that we can literally capture and put to work for us. This is probably the second most important energy source to understand, and is ENTIRELY differenent than the perspective of "saving," not spending, or cutting expenses. It has a virtually unlimited potential ROI.

If you're basing your happines on achieving the goal of making $10,000,000/year, and you decide you'd be equally happy with $50,000, you just saved yourself $9,950,000 a year! Ha! More importantly, you freed up a lot of time, income, willpower and energy that you can reinvest into more regeneartive activities.

But far more important than that, setting limits IS building measurable wealth in a tangible way. 

Social scientists have found that when people in most human communities are asked to spontaneously  rank people in their communities by their "wealth," they always put the financially RICHEST members of their community at the very bottom, along with the chronically diseased and homeless. Our art and literature are filled with such archetypes of the "miser," the rich-but-miserable, clinging to meaningless hoards for their own sake. Setting limits allows us to cultivate REAL wealth while avoiding investing our money in misery.

In the broader societal context, how much of wealth could be "freed up" by setting reasonable limits, that is currently wasted on such meaningless misery as making misers more miserable?  

The take-home is to set limits for ourselves. We need to decide what would really make us happy and stop: "spending money we don't have on things we don't want to impress people we don't like," to quote Chuck Palaniuk. 

Social Dividends: Yeah, your neighbors liking you is an energy stream you can capture to get work done, for example, keeping their dog Buddy's doo doo out of your salad garden. In the Permaculture literature, we typically call this social capital. 

The good news is that humans are inately good at building friendships and forming communities, so we don't have to spend too much time thinking about it.

The bad news is it comes with three big problems. 

Firstly, thinking about it too much makes you an A-hole. Some Permaculture sources describe giving neighbors cookies and zucchini to "pay" for their help on your new fish pond. Anybody with such a transactional view of their social interactions is basically an A-hole. And they will likely be seen as such by their neighbors, which kind of works counter to the whole point.

Secondly: Nobody wants your extra zucchini. 

Thirdly, the biggest problem with this transactional idea of social capital it is that it's largely BS. Social capital is non-transactional. Social research just hasn't upheld this very rational view of social capital where you do stuff for people and therefore they like you. People are just way more complicated than that. 

As it turns out, the research shows that more often the exact opposite is true. When you do stuff for people, they're likely to de-value your contributions to them and they tend to respect you less. Meanwhile, when you can manipulate people to do stuff for you, they actually like you better. 

Because humans are basically insane and irrational.

Think of all those movies where the Jocks pressure the nerds into giving them their lunch money, cleaning their rooms and doing their homework for them. Do the jocks like and respect the nerds more? Noooooo. Instead, the jock gives the nerd a playful noogie and says "you're alright, looser" and it's the best day the nerd's had all month.

So back to problem one: thinking about social capital too much makes you an a-hole. Also, it's a total bummer.

And yet, there are some smart, practical and ethical ways we can interact with the idea of social capital that are actually backed-up by social science research, and I plan on writing about those more in the future. 

But some basic advice is make diverse friends. Value people and generously INVEST IN EXPERIENCES with them. Don't try to buy friendship with transactions of good deeds or stuff. 

Loans: A lot of Permaculture people are really down on financing with loans. Me, not necessarily so. Especially when you cam use someone elses money at a very low interest rate. I'll write about this more later, but the big distinction throughout history has been that the prosperous borrow to invest in the means of production, paupers borrow to meet their needs. Often, the latter leads to forms of slavery. The former leads to wealth. 

So, when we borrow, we try to be mindful of using the borrowed money to invest in durable assets with a positive energy return. For example, we borrowed to buy our house, which is also a nursery and farm business which grows a large portion of our food and also a form of "regenerative" rental property.  When we purchased our car, we prioritized a vehicle that could be used as a productive asset to haul materials for our business and save us the money we were spending each month in rental fees. 

Chance: This is one of the most important streams of energy we can harvest, and possibly the most important to understand, yet it is seldom addressed, even in the Permaculture literature. 

While the downside of preparing for bad luck, resilience, is often treated in Permaculture, the scientific literature shows we can also learn to relate to chance in a better way and actually improve our luck. Which is good, because statisticians are finding that "luck" may be the #1 factor in determining the success or failure of most businesses and endeavors. Positioning ourselves to improve our luck can be one of the highest ROI activities we can invest in. Luckily, we'll be going into this in great detail soon. 

Culture: This is the stream of inherited knowledge that societies use to accomplish work. We position ourselves to "catch" cultural energy when we get edumacated, for example. Or when we write or recite poetry, or sing songs. We can take those streams of energy, sythesize them, improve them and then store them into useful (or not) forms. Like what you're reading now. (or not.) 

Gifts: Sure, getting them provides you with an energy stream, duh. But also giving them, if you're clever. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give him a food forest garden and you'll feed him a diverse, healthy diet, make your community a happier, healthier place to live. We can structure our "giving" so that we can give freely and generously without an expectation of reciprocity, yet still obtain a yield from it. 

Living Assets: Speaking of Food Forests, they're the perfect example of a living asset that can catch energy from the sun, the wind, the rain, the soil, and transform it into goodies that can meet your needs, such as by feeding you. But living assets are usually also "generative," meaning they can be used to produce something to meet your needs, such as fruit. And they're also usually "procreative," meaning they reproduce more of themselves. In this case, a single diverse food forest should reproduce itself, in the form of plant material, almost yearly by the time its 3 - 5 years old. Such living assets are the key to harvesting sun energy and turning it into exponential abundance. 

There are a large variety of living assets one can invest in to set up powerful positive energy yields in their lives depending on their goals. The important thing is to match them to our goals and resources. Not everyone needs an agriforest, livestock, a fuel wood lot, or a fish pond. Everyone can and should have a forest garden, in my opinion.  

Natural and Ecosystem Services: You know, phsyics and biology and stuff. Gravity, for example, can do great things for you, especially if you want to go down a hill. For example, it can move water for free or help you transport mulch and firewood. Wind, sun, rain. Ecosystems can clean your water and air, heat and light your home. They can safely take and process your poo and wee. In Europe people have to pay to use a toilet. Just remember that. 

Anyone can begin to harvest energy from natural processes in a huge variety of ways: foraging, wild-crafting, making gifts and decorations from natural materials, making natural medicines, harvesting rain water....

Natural Succession: One of the most important sources of natural energy we can harvest. The best "living assets" are those which work with natural succession instead of against it. For example, a lawn is technically a living asset which is both "generative" (grass clippings for fertilizer) and "procreative" (produces seeds and plants to start new lawns.) However, to maintain it as a lawn, we have to contantly fight against the power of natural succession, which wants it to grow weedy and eventually become a forest, by spraying and mowing and cussing at kids blowing dandelions. Meanwhile, if our idea is to have a forest, all we have to do is stop mowing and we can harvest the power of natural succession, which will kindly transform our lawn into a rich, fertile forest for free. 

Trade and exchange: Great forms of energy we can put to work for us. Pretty self explanitory.

Am I missing something important? Help me out in the comments section.  

Next, we'll start talking about types of assets ("De-Generative, Durable, Generative, and Procreative") and forms of captial we can invest these energy streams into.  

Spiritual Abundance

The Great Eastern Sun Rises over a Forest Garden

By Rachelle N. Yeaman, Guest Contributor

The word “spiritual” is going to put some (most?) folks off right away. We’re uncomfortable with it. Many of us are quietly afraid that permaculture won’t be taken seriously if it’s associated with tree-hugging nonsense. Only numbers can prove the importance of what we strive to do. Many of us have incredibly complicated relationships with the religions of our childhood, and whether we still practice or not, we don’t want to be preached at on permie blogs. And in any case, does spirituality really have any place in real conversations about real problems? The world is burning, people. We don’t have time for navel-gazing.

First, let me point out that two out of those three arguments are based in scarcity thinking. That’s a big, flashing sign that they’re bogus. The middle argument is valid; spirituality is a deeply personal thing. But I’m not here to talk about what to believe or even how, only about why we need to openly acknowledge and celebrate the importance of spiritual work, which I define as any belief, act, or process that allows one to find an innate sense of peace and a deeper connection with the world as a whole.

So, not only do we have the time to talk about it, but we have an imperative, as well. Humans are not by our nature logical or mechanical beings; to shame or even merely ignore one’s search for personal solace and worldly connection is to undermine one’s integral strength. And to do that is to reproduce everything permaculture strives to reverse.

In 2013, I attended the first Michigan Permaculture Convergence. It was a long weekend of project presentations, wide-ranging conversations, campfire stories, and excellent food. I had a wonderful time meeting great people and delving deep into interesting subjects. But by the second day, something that I had dimly noticed in reading the program became an important topic of discussion: all of the presenters were male, despite having a roughly equal male/female attendance, and in fact nearly all of the presenters were cis-gender white males, specifically, though that was less of a surprise because there was regrettably little racial or sexual identity diversity in the overall group.

There was no The Man running the show. The call for presenters had gone out to everyone, and the application process was relatively informal. The group that coordinated the event was at least partially female. And we were all self-identified permaculturalists; gender (or race or sexuality or age or…) wasn’t supposed to matter in these things.

So there was no point in looking for anyone to blame. The important observation was that, with the absolute best of intentions to the exact contrary, we had reproduced a white male dominated setting and conversation. Seeing that staring us in the face, could it be any real surprise that Michigan permaculture is also consistently racially homogenous, with a few happy exceptions?

We had a long conversation about the issue as a group. A few of us shrugged it off as a coincidence; there just didn’t happen to be any women who felt like presenting, obviously. Most of us were vaguely uncomfortable with the circumstances, but couldn’t really put voice to why. We talked about women in our culture often feeling that whatever project they’re working on needs to be good enough in order to be taken seriously, whereas men appear to have an easier time believing they can and should talk about whatever it is they’re doing. We talked about female communication often being different from the male-dominated cultural norm of what a presentation to a group of peers should look like. And we talked about a feeling that many of us work on projects with our partners and so had nothing of our own to discuss. None of these were answers or solutions, but they were a chance to air unspoken tensions and perspectives, a chance to re-evaluate the roles we play in the greater system.

How many of these unspoken tensions are staked through each of our lives? And how can we keep from encoding them back into our brave, new world if we don’t find them and reckon with them?

Unconsciously complying with and perpetuating hurtful cultural norms is something we do out of fear. It’s not the dramatic fight-or-flight kind of fear of meeting a bear in the woods. It’s the quiet, constant kind of fear that comes of predicting patterns and understanding cause and effect. Much as feelings of scarcity lead us to drain ancient aquifers to water geographically inappropriate crops and to dump fossil-fuel based fertilizers into dead and dying soil, scarcity of self-acceptance and power leads us to act against our personal self-interests in countless tiny, daily ways. It’s how the current system keeps going, with each of us doing our parts to legitimize it, whether that’s in denying our own power or in denying the power and validity of people who don’t look or speak like us.

Permaculture talks about leaving behind a scarcity mindset and then often skips on to abundance of food and energy and water. But yields and hectares and gigawatt hours don’t create abundance in human beings. As scarcity is a fear, abundance is a feeling of peace and connection. In a culture of scarcity, we cannot find a sense of abundance without persistent, conscious effort. What will change if we don’t tend and respect the fertility of our own inner selves?

One’s spirituality is a deeply personal process that should only be discussed and shared to everyone’s own comfort level. But the concept of spirituality, the idea that searching for peace and connection is an ongoing and important work, should be one that has equal legitimacy to discussions of soil health and micro climates. As we reclaim skills and biodiversity, we must reclaim ourselves. Because every time we go out to our gardens or confer about new projects, we are creating the system in our own image.