Transition Ethics: The Art of Compromise

Transition Ethics: The Art of Compromise

By Scott Gallant

Permaculture Design is many things to many people, but one of its pillars is a set of three ethics.  These as originally laid out by Bill Mollison are

• Care of the Earth

• Care of People

• Redistribution of the Surplus

These are our primary directives for how to act to sustain the earth.  Or on a simpler level these are the ways to a good life.

Teaching these ethics during our annual Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) course is one of my favorite topics.  It inevitably brings up pointed and challenging conversations, commonly around how to live these ethics in a world that often does not care for the earth, nor its people. How do we live and design for today’s world and for the parallel world we want to create?  This discussion leads to fear and anger based responses, a tear-it-down approach easy to rally around in a classroom of like minded, fed up and passionate souls.  Unsurprisingly, this is not an effective route for change.  It became apparent to our teaching team that this conversation on ethics lacked a route to speak about compromise.  To fill this gap we utilize a fourth ethic in our PDC curriculum; the Transition Ethic.

The Transition Ethic is a guide for how to be effective in creating change. In their recent book Practical Permaculture (one of the few references to the Transition Ethic in permaculture) Jessi Bloom and Dave Boehnlein state that “the transition ethic says that no one is going from zero to sustainable overnight. Making the transition takes time.” We have to meet people where they are at.  We must understand their cultural context.

When I first began learning about the industrial food system and what it was doing to our personal and environmental health, I was angry.  I desperately avoided all participation in that system.  This was easier to embrace while living and working at the Ranch, a NuMundo impact center. But it was challenging when I returned to my parents’ home during the holidays.  While they eat healthy by many standards, I was disappointed to find apples from Chile, processed meats, and corn-syrup fueled snacks around the kitchen.  It was not a local food paradise by any means, so I jumped on my soapbox and preached.  They needed to support local economies and take care of their bodies!  Didn’t they care about the amount of pesticides used on those tomatoes?!

They responded with kindness and listened, like the wonderful parents they are, but were likely rolling their eyes in the background, and not much changed.  A few years latter though, when I was able to show them how excited I was to manage a farm in Costa Rica, bake my own bread, and build my own furniture.  I began to see them make real changes.  As soon as my ideas came from a place of positive examples versus negative critiques the transition began for them. Their garden as expanded, they save and share more and more seeds every year, and the kitchen has a few more jars of ferments upon my home arrival.

This instilled in me that even though I was ready to change, the world around me operated at a different pace. So the question became: how do I navigate the series of compromises needed to encourage change?  The original three ethics of permaculture speak to this in varying ways, but they don’t provide a road map as clearly as an ethic of transition. For me it is a road map of humility, recognizing that we are all coming from different places and we can’t begin to guess the context of others’ lives.

The Ranch is one of the leading natural building centers in the Americas.  Yet, we still use concrete in our foundations and metal on our roofs.  We don’t love the environmental impact of either of these materials, but we have done the due diligence to know that they make the most sense in our current context.  These are compromises we must make in order to protect our infrastructure investments from rain, earthquakes, termites, and the tropical climate.  This infrastructure allows us to operate as a world-class education center, without it our livelihood and mission fails.  It is a compromise we must make.

The Transition Ethic makes it clear that these compromises are ok and often necessary.  The key take away that I share with our students is that we can never compromise our ethics but we can make ethical compromises.

Most of us use fossil fuels, don’t eat only local organic food, and participate in a globalized economy.  We may wish this wasn’t true, but this is the world we live in; and it requires an art of compromise.  So how do we make choices and design our lives for the current world and the one we are creating and visioning for the future?

Permaculture design is one tool at our disposal to navigate these waters (primarily through good design of our lives, homes, and land) and with a Transition Ethic in place it becomes an even more robust tool.

Learn more

We have a number of life changing workshops yearly.

We rely on all of the amazing ambassadors to our project to spread the word; if you know of anyone who needs a get-life-into-gear experience, send them to one of our classes!

Abrazos,

The Ranch Crew

Business Guilds and Micro-Enterprise Niches

Business Guilds and Micro-Enterprise Niches

No one who works at the Ranch expects this to be a lucrative career--that's not why we get up in the morning. But we do recognize the need to earn a living that provides basic resources. . As a small business that routinely puts people and planet above profits, providing for all our team members financially has been a challenge. So we've looked toward permaculture design to inspire us, turn problems into opportunities, , and use nature as our model to find creative financial solutions.

Guilds and Niches

The permaculture concepts of guilds and niches inspired us to create a set of business guilds and niche micro-enterprises. Last year we implemented organizational (invisible) structures that allow and support each Core Team member to pursue their own micro-enterprise. Each of these enterprises is a small business which is independent of the Ranch but still greatly interconnected. This is what Toby Hemenway, in his new book The Permaculture City, refers to as a Business Guild. He defines these “as a set of independent enterprises that are tied together by connections among some of their needs and yields.”

This is a strategy mimicking the plant polyculture guilds we employ in the garden. An intentional grouping of plants can support one another to create better growing conditions or cycling surplus/waste products amongst each other. These enterprises complement and support each other and the existing umbrella organization of the Ranch in this same pattern.

The overall hope is that each micro-enterprise can bring in additional income for Core Team members, while still supporting activities at the Ranch . For instance, if I attract a client (a pollinator) for our design consulting work and they are happy with the outcome (yield), it is highly likely they will visit the Ranch as a guest (positive feedback loop), and perhaps send an employee to get trained in our Permaculture Design Course (yield). All the while I gain more experience as a permaculture designer, and can be a better instructor for our students and apprentices (multiple functions). Everyone wins (supported by multiple elements).

Each of these enterprises fills a niche or opportunity that the larger Ranch organization is unable to take advantage of. In this way, each business shapes the economic micro-climate of the others by attracting more potential clients or customers. In addition, they all share resources, such as our brand and website, store space, farming and workshop tools, and vehicles. These businesses do not compete with each other, but complement and enhance the entire guild by filling different niches.

Current micro-enterprises include:

• Forest Fusion Herbal Products

• Rancho Mastatal Design/Build Collective

• Wood Art, Jewelry, and Cutting Boards

• Perennial Tree Crops Nursery

Design Consulting

The Rancho Mastatal Design/Build Collective (RMDBC) is a landscape design and natural building consultation service founded by Rachel Jackson, Nic Donati, and myself in 2014. Since then we've slowly been accepting clients and projects around Costa Rica and the globe.

As our website states:  We specialize in helping clients find the balance between meeting the needs of the land and accomplishing their own goals. From a quick consultation about edible plants for your home garden, to full scale site analysis and master planning for your property, RMDBC can help you create a productive and beautiful landscape.

Last year we worked in Costa Rica, Panama, and Fiji, providing advice and plans on reforestation efforts, timber plantations, cacao agroforestry, crops for production, and homestead design. We are beginning to accept a limited number of clients for 2016 and are excited about the conversations that are happening already.

We genuinely believe that our work can move projects months if not years ahead by filtering out unnecessary steps and focusing on the strongest leverage points. We treat our services as a farm input that demands a return on investment, and expect that our advice will save our clients money in the medium and long run. In particular we love talking through landscapes and possibilities with clients, and using our experience as a sieve to arrive at that perfect plan between our subjective goals and the objective lay of the land.

RMDBC consultation work helps further the overall mission of the Ranch as an educational facility by broadening our experience and reach. It also supports and is supported by the other Ranch micro-businesses: at the Ranch clients can see and purchase clear examples of high quality products like medicinal salves, spices, teas, coffee, and hand crafted wood products that are all made from plants grown locally or from out own agroforestry systems. This demonstrates the full circle of our work, from design and implementation to final product.

Right Livelihood

Our hope in creating these invisible structures and enterprises, is that all our Core Team members are able to complement and enhance their earnings from the main Rancho Mastatal business. This diversity of economic opportunities is a safety net for our livelihoods. While hardly unique to permaculture, all of the concepts we are exploring fit eloquently with the principals of permaculture: “diversity is dynamic stability;” “support important functions with many elements;” and “creative problem solving” can all be applied to both tangible and intangible challenges. Taking these principals out of the physical realm and into the social and economic domains will be one of the great opportunities for our team as we seek to strengthen our financial livelihoods in the years ahead.

We continue to put permaculture into practice at Rancho Mastatal and if you'd like to learn more about how we do so, consider joining us for our upcoming Permaculture Design Certification course this April 17th, 2016!

Scott Gallant