The three ethics of permaculture

What the three ethics are

Before permaculture offers a single technique, it asks what the work is for. Its answer is three ethics: care for the earth, care for people and fair share. They are short enough to remember on a walk across a field, and they serve as a compass whenever a design decision is not obvious. The design principles describe how to act; the ethics say why.

Bill Mollison placed the ethics at the start of Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988). David Holmgren restated them in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002) and gave each a short working phrase. On the site that presents his principles, earth care stands for rebuilding natural capital, people care for looking after self, kin and community, and fair share for setting limits and redistributing surplus. The same site notes that such ethics are not new: similar rules of conduct are found in most traditional societies, which had to live from the same land for many generations.

The three ethics are not a ranking. A design that feeds people but exhausts the soil fails the first. A restored hillside that nobody may enter fails the second. A garden whose surplus rots behind a fence fails the third. Good permaculture design looks for the place where all three are met at once.

Care for the earth

Earth care means looking after the living systems on which everything else depends: soil, water, forests, rivers and the countless creatures in them. Holmgren's phrase about rebuilding natural capital makes clear that protection alone is not enough where land is already damaged. The aim is to rebuild what has been lost, so that a place grows richer in life over the years instead of poorer.

Soil is the simplest measure. Where there is much life underground, in the form of humus and a working soil food web, a landscape holds water, feeds plants and recovers from drought and heavy rain. Earth care also includes respect for creatures that seem to have no use for people. Every organism has its role in an ecosystem, whether we understand that role or not.

In practice this ethic leads straight to the principles: catch and store energy, produce no waste and keep the water cycle turning on the land rather than letting the rain run off.

Care for people

Care for people starts close to home, with oneself, and widens to family, neighbours and the wider community. Holmgren's site adds a thought that is easy to overlook: where people's needs are met in simple and caring ways, the land around them prospers too. People who find well-being in relationships, skills and meaningful work need fewer things, and that relieves the earth.

For Terra Humana, this ethic has a natural anchor in rehumanization, the second half of the foundation's own name. Rehumanization means restoring people as conscious, caring participants in the living world. Everything social in permaculture belongs here.

Community. Gardens, farms and villages are designed for people who live and work together. Communities such as Tamera in Portugal show how land and community can be planned as one.

Sharing knowledge. Permaculture spread through teaching. Mollison's design course was meant to be taught onward by its graduates, and so the knowledge travelled from person to person. Knowledge that is freely shared is people care in its most lasting form.

Work and participation. Meaningful work on the land, done together, gives people a place and a role. Taking part in the care of a piece of land over years builds a bond that no amount of reading can replace.

Health. Food from living soil, clean water, time outdoors and work with a purpose are part of a healthy life. In this view, healing the land and healing people belong together.

Education. Children and adults who learn to read a landscape, to name its plants and to understand its cycles carry this knowledge into their own gardens and towns.

Fair share

The third ethic is the hardest, and perhaps the most important. In Holmgren's short form it asks us to set limits and to redistribute surplus. A fruit tree in a good year gives more than one household can eat; the surplus can be shared, preserved or given back to the soil. But fair share also asks what is enough. Continuous growth is not possible on a finite earth, and so each person and each project has to find its own measure of sufficiency.

The wording has changed over the decades. Early formulations by Mollison spoke of limits to population and consumption, Holmgren's book of limits to consumption and reproduction, and many teachers today simply say fair share. The core has stayed the same: take what you need, pass on what you do not need, and put the surplus back into the care of earth and people.

Surplus is not only harvest. It can be seed, which keeps the seed cycle turning when gardeners exchange it, and it can be time, labour, tools and above all knowledge. Holmgren's site stresses that this ethic is about what is right for us to do, not about what others should do. Fair share begins in one's own household. Two principles give it a practical side: obtain a yield, because a design must give real returns, and apply self-regulation and accept feedback, because it must also know its limits.

From ethics to design

The ethics become useful when they are turned into questions. Before planting a tree, digging a pond or laying a path, a designer can ask: does this build soil and life, or use them up? Does it serve the people who live here and those who come to learn? Where does the surplus go? Holmgren's twelve principles, beginning with observe and interact, and the older design rules of Bill Mollison help to find the answers. Thinking in loops, as described under cycle thinking, is where the three ethics meet: what stays on the land feeds the soil, and what is shared feeds the community.

The three ethics at Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia, with a dry season that lasts roughly from May to September. Earth care there begins with water and soil. Project Eden starts with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water on the land. Swales are planned; none has been built yet.

Care for people has been part of Project Eden from the start. The plans include a permaculture academy, spaces for encounter and seminars, and non-profit hosting of volunteers and researchers. This TerraWiki, open to anyone, belongs to the same intention: knowledge about land and its cycles should be shared, not kept.

Fair share, for us, also means honesty. We document what we try at Sa Medada, including what does not yet work, so that others can learn from it without paying for the same mistakes.