Scale of Permanence Worksheet Tool Launch TPS-0107

This is a simple tool launch announcement.

There's a very useful conceptual tool, a scale if you will that you learn often in permaculture design courses, it's origin is with a famous farmer, Yeoman from Australia that keyline farm design was founded by. I'm not an expert, but I am a fan.

The training tool I created is based on The Scale of Permanence. I'm adapting from a few features in addition to the original that were done by the esteemed heroes of permaculture, Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, very accomplished permaculture designers.

I wanna give that credit and say, this version of it has been updated by them.

I'll give the list and then explain it in my own words.

The list, as it appears from their adaptation is aesthetics and experience, soil zones of use, buildings and infrastructure, micro climate, vegetation and wildlife access and circulation, invisible structures, water, landform and climate.

So if you haven't encountered this before, you haven't taken a permaculture design course, you may not have a structure in your mind of how these all relate and what having them in that order actually indicates, so please allow me to to elaborate on that.

The order that they were just read in those separate, what I would call site design features.

Each line that I read off from start to finish represent a scale of permanence, in other words, how difficult or easy would it be to modify in any way, shape or form, any of those things?

Obviously, this is not set in stone. It's not an exhaustive list. It's a conceptual framework that people in permaculture are not limited by, but are certainly aided by.

It helps to facilitate narrowing down focus and having a framework to work from that's already pre-built and you could obviously take it any direction.

I'm happy with it as it is, if I need more nuance by all Means I'm free to add or subtract as necessary but I'm happy with it as it is.

I'm gonna do this as an exercise in my own ability to unpack each of these and to apply my permaculture experience and knowledge and skills into explaining these.

There's this circle concerns and circle of influence.

There's things in life that you wish you could change, but they're beyond your control to do so.

So it makes sense to address your priorities accordingly if you cannot change something easily or at all.

Is that where you wanna spend all of your time and energy, being frustrated, trying to squeeze blood from a stone or drive against a brick wall?

We have all these cultural cliches about the inefficiency of trying to change red tape and institutional inertia and bureaucracy.

That's probably a great example. Can you have more of an impact and be more efficient by really socially designing your family environment? Or are you gonna take on the Goliath of some form of bureaucracy?

Well, you may have to do both, but knowing which is more efficient to adjust versus not is gonna help you allocate your precious life energy and your design thinking a little bit better or a lot better.

So that's the idea in my words. I'm gonna also use my words to explain my interpretation of the words they chose for this list.

So aesthetics and experience to me what that brings to mind. I'm gonna go the reverse order, because I'm gonna start with the most permanent on the scale of permanence, which is climate.

So good luck. Well, hey, some people say there's a lot of changing in the climate.

It's an emergent property that industrial society is having an adverse impact on the acceleration of global warming.

That's something I definitely feel is inarguable, not that the planet has never been hot before, but that the rate that it's heating up now is a factor of human activity. That's out of balance. It doesn't matter personally to win the debates about whether or not global warming is good or bad or dangerous, or resulting in massive climate refugees and mass extinctions and extinction events, this is the six extinction.

The way to short circuit all of the debate around that is to say, nontoxic.

I don't believe you can have a modern civilization that's non toxic therefore I'm against modern civilization.

I'm against all civilization however previous civilizations were far less toxic because they didn't mine chemicals and ores out of the Earth at the rate or to the extent of messing with the chemistry that we do now.

I definitely would have enjoyed not being exposed to all kinds of carcinogens in previous civilizations.

Now, I feel like that's impossible. I don't think it's possible that we're gonna have nontoxic modern civilization so I chose to extricate myself from it and do what I can from a safer distance. I try to help others discover that it's unsustainable and undesirable, and that it should peacefully collapse.

So without getting apocalyptic and zombie apocalypse, I'll just leave it at that, the more proactive way of putting it.

But good luck as an individual. Good luck changing the climate back.

How about that? Let's agree to disagree, if we must, on whether or not global warming is affected by human activity.

But hey, it's almost killing me, these temperatures. So I have a desire for the climate to be reversed and for it to cool, but good luck for me to do that.

So, point being, this is a very immovable object, the climate and even without the discourse in the debate on climate change, you're designing from a constant, it's not that it doesn't change or that it fixed...are your crops going to die in a killing frost in the winter?

I just had a late frost, it was a significant gap between the one and only other frost day that I've observed this winter a bunch of warm and then another frost day just the other day, which could have adversely affected some of my plantings.

But luckily, they were tucked away under the soil, still not having sprouted up. I think that they're fine. But that's an example of things that you wanna design around.

This to the point of the being at the mercy of the climate that I can't change much for my own benefit. I can't really modify it to my liking.

I have to be at the mercy of it. Part of that for me is try to take clues from nature around me.

I see herbaceous seedlings coming up after rain, even though it's still early February.

Here was my adjustment based on that factor, I said, if it was a warmer season or or later in the season right now, then I probably would do what I normally do, which is soak the seeds I'm gonna plant for a couple few hours before planting them to increase germination rate.

But that actually kind of does is, the side effect is that if you force them to germinate, and that's not when they would prefer to based on their own innate intelligence, their own way of sensing temperatures and moisture levels, the time, however, it could be magnetic, it could be any combination of factors, but sticking with the non metaphysical, sticking with the straight physics...

If I'm forcing them to germinate by soaking them, and there's another frost, then I just lost all of them.

So I said to myself, this is early in the season to be planting, but what I'm gonna do, since it's raining, I wanna scatter the seeds.

I'm gonna start start watering, let it rain to save me some water and those which want to come up because they can take it now, they will. Those that are hesitant and wanna wait and not sprout now and give it more time, because that's their nature, and they know what they're doing, I will not have forced them to do it. So that's me being humbled by climate, being humbled by the cold, the cold part of the year and its effects on my design here.

Moving right along landform, this refers simply to the things like, are you in the mountains? Are you in a valley? Is it in the hills? So landform would just be the shape of the land, the type of rock and soil.

How close is the bedrock? How much top soil is there? There are things that take millions upon millions of years to determine.

You can at a small scale, obviously, do earthworks and change some of that, but generally speaking, we're talking very large scale landforms.

Hopefully, you're not gonna turn a forest into a desert, you can turn a desert into a forest that's what we're trying to do, that's what I'm trying to do right here.

Trying to learn and work with the efficiencies that we can to so called terraform, the land, but the macro landform, geological features, those are generally unchangeable.

I don't think it would be typical for a permaculture designer to literally move mountains the way that they do for mining and for developments and whatnot.

There are a lot of folks in permaculture who feel like we shouldn't be disturbing the wilderness to do this at all.

We should be doing this on already disturbed and degraded lands in order to leave the wilderness as it is, what's left of it.

That's reflected in the zonation theory.

I'm spiraling out from a wasteland homestead that was in ruins when I got here.

So my zone one is right on top of a wasteland slab of an old house.

I'm not starting my project in the most wild and free and untouched and undisturbed areas. So there's that sensibility.

Somewhat less permanent, but still very permanent is the features of water, the natural features of water.

Typically, you're not gonna move a river, or you shouldn't move a river, and if you do move a river, I doubt it's a good idea in the long term, the hydrology of the site is, is another way of looking at it.

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There's obviously the bodies of water. Are you at a low point where you cannot stop from flooding.

Despite the droughts of the world and the global increased temperatures, paradoxically more torrential flooding rains are happening because it creates more evaporation of the water on the surface of the Earth, that goes in the atmosphere and it drops as rain.

So the warmer it gets, the wetter it gets. You're not always prepared to put that water to intelligent use, and it can be very destructive.

When people mess with the natural power and flow of water, that's very dangerous, and it can be very costly and very deadly to get that wrong.

It's also costly and deadly to not have enough of it and not be close enough to it.

I'm certainly in a situation where I'm humbled by a lack of water for the most part, and I have to do my best to capture as much of it as possible when I get a chance.

So moving up from that, which is pretty self explanatory, pretty obvious, invisible structures. This is not the most intuitive to people outside of permaculture but invisible structures, it's an engineering way to describe governments, laws, social norms, religious factors.

If someone said invisible structures, that sounds like you're a ghost hunter or something, what are you talking about?

Oh, invisible structures, okay. What's a more, maybe down to Earth, intuitive way of putting it? I would say the social structures, that's good enough. I think the utility of saying invisible is just that they are structures, and don't underestimate them, and don't deny their existence or turn your back on them, because they can be as determinant in your life as any of these forces of nature.

Because you can go to jail, you can hurt someone, you can be hurt, and then if you're caught up in liability, you're caught up in the invisible structures for better or for worse.

Some invisible structures are like a land trust, that's less of a doom and gloom notion of invisible structures, something more beneficial, less threatening. The idea of I'm gonna create an invisible structure to protect the integrity of the vision of this land, which is what I have done personally.

So it could be all kinds of different social structures in this scale.

The reason why, in my mind, their positioned where they are in the scale of permanence is that we're talking about institutions, and we're talking about often legal structures and institutions that are not very dynamic and very rigid, very slow moving change and require a lot of political will...look at Congress in the US right now...

Good luck with changing people's minds. People with power, people with authority, certainly the corrupt people who are profiting from invisible structures that make it difficult, if not impossible, to do what we're trying to do with permaculture...

So I would agree with positioning the institutional scale of invisible structures and even the smaller social scales on a small community level. It's still a lot of work to get desired outcome that everyone is not killing each other over.

Access and circulation I would have to look more into what they were wanted to articulate with circulation. I'm not gonna speculate, I'm just gonna say sticking with access, that typically is referring to easement and roads, and what type of roads you can even legally build or can physically build.

If you're trying to decide whether or not to buy a piece of property, this is like a checklist that you would use.

Do you have access? For me, there is no access. Access is a four wheel drive, or your two legs. There is no road. It's a trade off. But for most people, they're not gonna do it the way I've done it.

For most people they're gonna wanna rely on a two wheel drive. I've got funny stories about coming out here with the two wheel drive and realizing very quickly I was not gonna make it without a four wheel drive.

It made me think how could I have lived my whole life so sheltered that I didn't rely on a four wheel drive since.

Why would I ever think to ever own a vehicle that did not give me that force multiplying power of being able to go off road anytime, anywhere in pursuit of happiness or in escaping and evading any form of threat or danger.

The idea that the second you get off the road in a two wheel drive vehicle, you're completely useless in almost any terrain, to me, that's just unthinkable. That is probably one of the most civilian friendly lessons from the tactical people, just how could you handicap yourself in that way? I'm not gonna impune myself or others. But I definitely feel now that if your goal is to be tactical, it would be extremely negligent not to have a four wheel drive vehicle that you have experience operating, you know what types of tires to have. These are all things that I had to learn, and I would stand by that.

If there was nothing else anyone else I ever did to bring tactical thinking to permaculture, then it should be as simple as one thing four wheel drive, period.

That's more of a skill that you have, that's impermanent, because you can change the vehicle you have. However, we'll get further up the list to those things you can change.

But the idea of access and circulation, that will determine how critical it is to to have a four wheel drive or not, or whether or not you need a bridge, or what the cost would be to maintain a bridge.

I lived at a site where the county or the state, or whoever, the civil engineers, they said, you've got water running through your land. You were responsible for maintaining the easement, therefore, the maintenance of this little bridge, this tiny little bridge that's all on you, you're liable for it. So that's very critical. Are you responsible legally for maintaining a road?

Are you gonna have to share that road legally with an easement of neighbors? Are you gonna need neighbors to let you have easement? Those are all factors, and there are many more, but those are the most basic ones.

I think that tell's the story of it. So now we're getting towards the middle, and the next one is vegetation and wildlife.

Obviously, unless you're clear cutting, which you should not be doing, you're somewhat at the mercy of the existing patterns of vegetation and wildlife.

Hopefully, if you're doing permaculture design by the book, you're leaving most of the natural vegetation, and certainly the wildlife to the largest percentage of the area that you control, that you own or that you're operating on, it's gonna be that zone five wilderness area.

Whatever you take from it, or how you manage it is gonna be within the smaller and closer in zones. But for the most part, we're adapting to and we're tucking ourselves into and nesting ourselves within the patterns of wild vegetation and wildlife, and hopefully obtaining sustainable yields, and also feeding back into those systems to make them more robust and resilient, so that it's better with us there. Stronger together and leaving it better than we found it and not degrading it.

Next one up is microclimate, you can be growing citrus trees in extreme cold temperature mountainous areas using techniques of creating microclimate mainly with the thermal mass of water, of ponds. Being able to use the thermal mass of the ponds in order to inhibit frost, and therefore allow vegetation that would otherwise be killed by that cold climate, give them just enough of a buffer from that so they could thrive.

That's one example, another example sometimes people refer to as frost pockets. So being aware of not designing non cold hardy plants into a system where there's gonna be micro climates known as frost pockets, low points, or areas where cold air is trapped and gets stuck. It's easy to notice when there is frost on a site where it's more or less thick or intense. That's gives you an indication of how to plant accordingly. Maybe you just stack piles of wood there, or something that's not gonna be affected by it. Or maybe you need chill hours for stone fruit trees and therefore it would be advantageous to make use of that microclimate.

Creating rockery is for reptiles and that are beneficial to do pest management. So you create microclimates for them where they can hang out.

It's not just microclimates for you and plants. It could be microclimates that you manage in order to attract or to deflect different types of critters.

We're more than halfway to the easy stuff. I will put it to you that way. And it's interesting that we started out with climate, and then once we start getting closer to the easy stuff, what do you get microclimate?

So if we kind of reverse engineer that logic a bit, we started out with macro climate, which is very hard to change, and then we end up with microclimate. So if you just by extension, by example, macro and microeconomics that kind of gives you a sense of the whole spirit of this, what we're trying to dial into and where those dials are.

So building an infrastructure, if you buy land and there's nothing but wilderness on it, then you can't blame anybody else for where the buildings were put.

Certainly, there are a lot of properties where the buildings are on the shady side of the slope, and therefore they've been destined to fail from the start, and are not conducive to good permaculture design considerations, because your zone one is gonna be shaded out. Your zone one plantings are not gonna survive.

Infrastructure is plumbing. It's solar panels, it's electrical conduit. It's tool sheds and equipment and all of the material plant that's being used for the project in addition to dwellings. The building and infrastructure aspect of a design is where you determine, depending on what you're inheriting from the site, whether or not what you're gonna build from scratch, the placement of it.

You typically would have an easier time, for the purposes of the scale, moving or demolishing, rebuilding, building from scratch, tearing out, reinstaling,etc.

It's important for that to be managed with a lot of wisdom and intelligence and experience to get it right the first time and not end up making a mistake that costs you a fortune to undo.

Building and infrastructure aren't the cheapest and easiest things to modify or to establish, but it's far easier than changing the climate.

So moving right along zones of use, I mentioned that a couple of times, but these are the typically five permaculture concentric circle zones, representing how often and how intense the use of the zones are.

So circling out like a dart board from the center point, which is your main dwelling or your main facility.

Some people start at zero, one, two, three, four, and five.

I would say the first three are the ones are where you are almost 100% in control. You may be utilizing some landform features and some water features that are natural in those first three zones. But typically, those first three zones are the most "designer" of the system.

How you set up your gardens, how you set up your social areas, how you set up your facilities and the processing that you're gonna do, composting, out buildings and sheds and whatnot. That's including the building infrastructure part, but getting to the point where I have the most control, the most agility.

Up from that, we have soil, which soil amendments, whether you have fast draining sandy soil or slow draining clay soil or something in the middle, you can always modify it, generally depending on the scale.

For a garden scale, obviously, it's very minimal inputs, minimal effort.

It is an art and a science. I don't take that away from it being a very hard won skill set to be a master of it.

But in terms of the scale of it and even the price of it, I've seen people throw some pretty gnarly material into the ground in order to create a moisture barrier to slow down the drainage.

I've seen people use materials, even in the name of permaculture, that I wouldn't dare use. Everyone's got their own sense of purity.

Some people love cardboard. Some people would never use it because of who knows what chemicals are in the tape residue and the printing.

If there's any kind of gloss printed on cardboard, I would return it to the recycling industry if I can but I would not put it in my horticulture so to speak. So amending the soil however you wanna do it, is probably one of the most manageable, easy to modify at the gardening scale.

We're talking about scale of permanence. If you're in the badlands of South Dakota, maybe you may have to drop that down the list a little more.

For the most part, if you know how to do a compost heap, and you know how to do vermiculture, you're already on your way to being able to make really great soil, no matter where you are in the world.

The last one, aesthetics and experience, Do you maintain an orderly environment where the the chaos of nature is kept beautiful and well maintained, so that pathways are well maintained, and it's a welcoming environment. It's a place people want to spend time. It's a place all forms of life wanna enjoy. Obviously, you could create features for bird baths, and have what they might call a sacrificial garden, where there's stuff you plant because you want wildlife to approach and do its thing.

You can't shake your finger at the sky and blame any sort of sky deity for your failure to manage the aesthetics and the experience of a space.

For those of us who are not mechanical engineers per se, but are interested in design because of home and garden type sensibilities, that's great because this movement needs everybody, but it definitely needs to have a very mutually beneficial synergistic relationship between aesthetics and experienced folks and people who are dealing with the hard science earth science engineering civil engineering, all that stuff.

Not all civil engineering projects result in aesthetic experiences. So let's work together.

What I've done with the tool on the page on my site is basically the simplest possible way of creating a learning tool.

I wanted to have an exam. I wanted to exemplify the use of a web design feature that I had not yet put to use in my career.

That is using the drag and drop feature, which you probably used a million times, certainly to build playlists or move files around.

You're doing drag and drop all the time on your native operating system.

So everyone's used to that on a web page. It has its own art and science, its own logic, its own features and parameters.

I created a table where there's two columns. The right column is the list of all of the permanent and impermanent, less permanent, most permanent, the list that I just explained, they're purposefully out of order, and they do not match the scale that you see in the left column.

That left column has a scale of gradations between green, yellow and red.

So we started with the red zone, in the middle was the yellow zone, and we ended with the green zone.

Another way of putting that, which is typed out on the page in the left column, is that scale from least permanent to less permanent to more permanent to most permanent. That was my little twist that I added to it. My adaptation of it, so you you see the scale on the left, even with a color coding gradient, and the words from least to most permanent.

You get the conceptual framework before all these variables are plugged into it.

The drag and drop feature, as you may have guessed, it's basically a matching game type of experience.

You can play it by intuitively trying to sort these out and drag and drop them all into their correct order, just totally by intuition and reasoning alone.

This isn't a hard science. This is very much an emergent property of a lot of thinking.

Basically, you find one and it won't drop into place unless it's the right slot. So you can do trial and error and just drag them over.

I feel like there is a value in object manipulation. There is more to the process of learning this, how to sort this list out, and how to think about it with the color coding and the visual experience of dragging it over.

It's another dimension to learning this material. You could see it just listed out and numbered, but that's not as feature rich as what I've created, which is very simple, just a couple of extra dimensions to make it a little more sticky in your mind, this color coding and the process of sorting them out.

So you take a little bit of pride, look what I did, I sorted these out. I put them in place. Now I'm gonna just sit back and marvel at this just a little bit longer than I would have if it was just a plain list of words with numbers and an explanation.

So that is my thesis. That's my interpretation. I hope that folks out there who've taught this and articulated this a million times in the courses, that they feel like I have done a service to the movement and not a disservice in the way that I've explained it.

I'm always excited to hear all the different ways and all the different styles and nuance that people bring to make a unique learning experience out of this material.

This can save you money. It can save your life.

It could be the difference between making it. It can be make it or break it difference in terms of this sustainable human settlement design process that we're talking about here with permaculture.

So hopefully that helps you and you enjoy it.