Creatively use and respond to change

The old saying: vision is seeing things as they will be

Holmgren pairs this principle with the saying vision is not seeing things as they are but as they will be. It is less a folk proverb than a maxim, and the principles site gives it without an author. Its meaning fits land work exactly. Whoever plants an oak sapling must see the shade it will cast in forty years. Whoever looks at a bare, eroded slope must be able to imagine the woodland it could carry, and must also see the stages in between.

Vision in this sense is not wishful thinking. It rests on knowing the processes that shape a place: how water moves, how soil forms, which plants follow which. The better we understand them, the more our picture of the future becomes a plan rather than a dream.

How it looks in nature

The most familiar change in nature is ecological succession. Bare ground does not stay bare. Pioneer plants arrive first, cover the soil, build humus and cast the first shade. Shrubs follow, then trees that need the shelter the pioneers created. Each stage changes conditions in a way that makes the next one possible. Nature uses change rather than resisting it.

Disturbance belongs to this process. In Mediterranean landscapes fire has shaped vegetation for a very long time, and many plants have answers to it, as Juli Pausas and Jon Keeley describe in their review of fire in the history of life. The cork oak protects its buds under thick bark and sprouts again from its crown after a fire. Many rockroses carry seeds that germinate after heat. What looks like destruction is, for these species, part of the cycle.

Living things also respond to change by moving. After the ice ages forests shifted across whole continents, one generation of seeds at a time. Today many species arrive in new places as conditions change, often fast-growing newcomers on disturbed ground. Terra Humana sees them as a solution strategy of nature with great potential for rapid renaturation, when they are guided and later replaced step by step by the target species. Species on the EU list of invasive alien species of Union concern are never used.

Where the principle works in the TerraWiki

These pages show ways of using change and answering it:

• Ecological succession: the sequence of stages by which land heals, the change a designer can read and guide.
• Syntropic agriculture: pruning and planting so that succession moves forward instead of being held back.
• Pioneer plants and nurse trees: the first stage, planted with the later ones already in mind.
• Climate-adapted trees: choosing trees for the climate they will grow old in, not the one of the past.
• Assisted migration: helping species or seed sources move as fast as the climate does, with caution.
• Seed cycle: seed saved year after year from plants that coped well carries adaptation into the next generation.
• Desertification and regreening: change in the wrong direction, and how farmers and communities have turned it round.
• Tony Rinaudo: he saw a forest in the living stumps of a barren field and showed how to let it grow back.

At Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia, with mild winters and a dry season lasting roughly from May to September. Project Eden begins where succession begins: with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water. Several nitrogen fixers are already in the soil, among them Tephrosia, the coral tree, Inga edulis and Leucaena, as part of that first stage. Swales are planned; none has been built yet.

Ecologists often describe Mediterranean macchia not as an endpoint but as a stage of succession that can develop towards woodland where fire and grazing ease; the macchia on the steeper slopes can be read in this way. Banana, mango, avocado, cherimoya, papaya, moringa and citrus are being trialled in the microclimate of the slope, and the first tree, a service tree, was planted in 2024 on the very hot southern flank. Which species cope with the summers of the coming decades is something only years of observation will show.

The previous principle, use edges and value the marginal, looked at the meeting places between worlds. With this one the twelve principles are complete. The journey through permaculture continues from here into reading the land and the tools of design.