I'm talking about the psychology of going from one permaculture project site to the next under the circumstances of it being where you're gonna be posted up, where you're gonna be dwelling, and for however long, whether it's a day, a week, a month, a year, or the rest of your life.
For me, once I have a sense of the site, the pressure begins to say to myself, what has to be done to accelerate or optimize the food production systems and emergency supplies, water, medicine, energy, etc.
The survival needs, which there are many lists of. If you wanna go in my order, it would be security, shelter, water, food, energy, medicine, communications, and then less critical, nice to haves further down that list.
But those are the main ones that I tend to think about if I'm not forgetting anything off that list, but getting that stuff squared away, assessing what's in place and what needs to be acquired, and then looking into the budgets and looking into procurement logistics, all that kind of stuff.
For me, because I have the survivalist background, getting to a project site, the pressure begins.
What's the season and what season are we aiming for? When does the growing season start? Or how reliant can we become on the production of this ecosystem as fast as possible?
Because for me, even if it's not the prerogative of whoever owns the site that I'm on, it is to me.
It's a given. I take it for granted that I am one of the very few people in the United States, not in the world because there's a ratio of a lot more people in the world. But in the United States, it is the prerogative of most people to procure their food, water from the supply lines.
It's a prerogative to have it be on what you would call a just in time basis, meaning minimal storage, minimal self production.
Even people who enjoy gardening. It's almost symbolic or it's a fraction of the food supply into the home or into the workplace or facility, or whatever it is that’s being designed.
Rarely are you gonna find a place that says, within the site map, within the borders of this parcel we're either 100% independent with everything that we subsist on, or our intention is to get to that, not just eventually, but now, yesterday.
So I know for myself, I come to wherever property I'm on with the agenda of a hundred percent self sufficiency, self reliance, sustainability yesterday.
And if you do that too heavy handed, or you do that too aggressively, you're gonna lose friends and you're not gonna be welcome.
You're not gonna be invited back. The nuance and the sort of grace, the tact, is to meet people where they're at and bring them what they want, introducing things that you might want.
But the interesting thing that I'm touching on here is this dynamic of, well, if I'm gonna be here and I can't impose things that may not be wanted, but that I know are necessities, E.G., I have my own food, my own water, my own communications, my own power, I'm self contained within my truckstead.
All those survival needs for quite a bit of time, I would say, six months to a year, if we're measuring the food and then water filtration, rainwater catchment, the potential to store at least several months of water depending on how I use it.
So let's just say three months, three to twelve months at any given time.
I'm definitely rolling with three to twelve months of completely self sufficient, self contained ecology for myself.
But when I go post up somewhere, I also have to consider that perhaps and resources would rightly be surrendered to a collectivity wherever I end up.
So if I wanna buffer that, I gotta scale up their preps and scale up their food production to where they're not relying on my finite supply.
I'm a mobile trucksteader from going from one project site to another.
I should be working with clients. I should be working with whoever is managing the sites to be able to say, I have very limited space to do what I do.
I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, but here's a strategy that I would propose for scaling up the water storage that you have, scaling up the food storage you have, scaling up the garden space that you have the square footage, scaling up the rainwater catchment, mostly on their behalf.
Whoever the client is, wherever it is, that just can always be scaled up no matter how rich or poor or what the climate is.
The climate obviously can determine some of the what gets scaled up, in what order and the priorities of that.
But I definitely have to address this feeling that I get when I set foot on a property that I'm gonna work on and I'm doing it from my mobile truckstead, with my tools and my food and all the stuff I mentioned, that sense of my I have energy that comes from this powerful source of get things established immediately as soon as possible as safely as possible. That's when the twelve hour plus work days come out of me year round, no matter what, if it's the middle of the summer, if I have to take breaks, if I have to work in the shade or build shade, if I have to bathe more, and even adjust my diet to prevent candida growth and fungal growth.
Because I'll be out there, sweating in the sun and working, and I'll be blistering, and I'll be chafing and whatnot. So I have to be very careful about how many carbs I eat and the sugar in my blood.
I don't wanna be feeding, what would be taking over in those places of cracked and blistered and scraped skin.
But there is a beast mode that comes out of me when I set foot somewhere and I go we need to scale up these things.
Maybe some things are all right. Maybe some things can wait or are perfectly fine the way they are.
But for most of us, I think we could all admit that every area would be better to be scaled up if it were to happen, that we couldn't just go out and buy whatever we want from wherever we want, either because of personal financial reasons or supply chain disruptions from the weather or from civil unrest.
Whatever those factors are that are relevant to each site and each person, every individual, in every human, social organizational unit, family business, whatever it is, there'll be a different set of risk factors.
But I'm the one who is thinking about what happens on this site if the power goes out, if the roads are blocked, how many days forward do we have?
What is the calculation that we're gonna use to know how many days forward we have?
If the lifestyle of long term food storage and lifestyle of large volumes of water storage is done properly in a way that can be filtered or decontaminated, etc.
Filtration and disinfection are the right words. Those are all the things that I take note of, and then I'm wanting to optimize.
And it's this beast mode energy. That’s what's so fascinating to me, because I look back at some of the things that I will have installed during that phase of beast mode where I was just tunnel vision on this stuff has got to get corrected optimized cleaned out. So I'm cleaning things, just digging up buried treasures on a site.
Liberating different tools and things that are overgrown, and just organizing and inventorying everything.
And that gust of energy, I can be in that beast mode, I get adequate rest of course, I prioritize adequate rest but working as long in the day as I can taking whatever breaks I need to, but doing that triage of getting a site as optimized as it can be within the budget, so that at least the most catastrophic mishaps, the most catastrophic deficiencies, can be shored up within reason, within budget.
Then often you find there's a lot of miscellania on a site that can be repurposed or put to use to optimize and scale up some of these systems, things that are capable of storing water or materials that could be used to build garden beds.
So you don't have to buy everything and have it be a glut of a budget or a budgetary bottleneck. That is a permaculture way to assess and take inventory of all of the potentially reusable materials on a site, even stuff that was thought to be trash.
And even pulling it straight out of the trash can. Believe me, I'd done that so many times, and I'm building a nursery out of cut plastic bottles of water or other beverages or other food condiment containers, and just bootstrapping a nursery operation with scrap materials straight out of the trash can.
It's not permanent, aesthetically speaking, for most people in most places. But you do what you gotta do, because you gotta get that arsenal of seedlings in place as soon as possible, like I said, yesterday.
So the point of me sharing this is to say, anybody listening to this at any time, I hope it is a reminder to pause and make an assessment of the places that you frequent, your home, your workplace.
If you're a survivalist and you have a bug out retreat, or you just own secondary properties, and you never thought of it that way of needing to go and, quote, bug out there, retreat in an emergency.
Any place that you have any influence and control over can be assessed and can be optimized and scaled up in terms of having those basic survival needs in place.
And the permaculture strategies make it even more interesting, more ecologically rich, more alive, more truly sustainable than just storing food, storing water, storing seeds, actually put it to work and make an ecosystem that's far more resilient than just the things that you have in boxes and bags to really tap into that sense of urgency.
As the outsider, you come in, and there's all kinds of complacency, with all clients, just accepting things as they are, having adapted to it.
And you don't wake up everyday in your normal routine, and think about, how can I innovate and optimize and tweak all these different parameters of everything?
That's for someone, an outside consultant, to come in and again, with tact and with patience and with understanding and not being too aggressive, with what you would impose.
But then the dynamic is different, in the days where I would do consulting and I would go back to wherever I was living, I wasn't posted up there.
Now, my paradigm has been, it's actually been like this for quite a while, for years even where it's like whenever possible, if I'm gonna do dedicated permaculture design and install work, I'm gonna wanna be posted up on the site.
I don't wanna commute if I can help it. So that means I'm part of the emergency plan. I'm part of the survival plan. I've got survival needs.
And whoever else is there, that's the actual owners or the people living there or running it, whatever the success may be, there becomes a dynamic of me taking responsibility for them and them taking somewhat of a responsibility for me.
Again, I take it to the extreme, so I dial in things for myself, more than most people care to, for themselves.
It’s an ala carte menu. This is what I do. This is how I do it. If you wanna put money into this project, cool, we'll prioritize that.
But either way, we're getting a nursery going, we're cleaning things up, we're inventorying things, we're building things, and then planting what folks wanna plan.
Then on the side, I'll make sure that everyone is getting what they want going out of me first and foremost. And then where there's extra space, that's where I will assert my gentle selection of crops that I wanna subsist on and survive on, and that I wanna see established, and maybe that I wanna take with me from the nursery.
So I can have my little cut of the operation to live on and to take with me as I continue to roll out and scale out different strongholds in my life.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna post up and I'm gonna establish something in this place, then I want them to be thriving.
If and when I come back and do the same thing, and then create for myself a node, a network of nodes where I can have the confidence and the faith and the trust that even without a lot of extra input, or even if it was totally neglected, even if I had to dig for it or clear brush or weeds to find it that, oh, that's where I planted that perennial plant.
And now it needs a little more light and water and soil amendments and whatnot. But it's there. It's been established. So to me, that's what it's all about, feeling that pressure to establish systems and establish crops, and have it be beneficial and and permitted and welcomed by the host site, if you will.
But it's deeper for me now, since I don't have to go and work for strangers, I'm gonna work on sites of people that are not strangers, but are people that I care about and wanna stay connected with.
Then I'm going to go through these protocols and optimize and enhance and clean up what already is happening with their direction, with their prerogatives and objectives and prioritize them.
And then with whatever physical space and mental, emotional bandwidth, whatever finances, whatever is left, that is auxiliary to their primary agenda...
Then that's the playground I have to establish what I want establish and to get things going in a nursery, and then just continue to suggest things.
And even when appropriate, bring in my own resources and say, you know what? Hey, I'll put this here if you'll take care of it, and then we'll share it, stuff like that.
To me, that's just a powerful way of looking at doing permaculture design work as a nomad and being out there in service and finding those synergies and always being ready. To know when I hit that ground, I'm gonna start going in a beast mode, and then look back after hours, days, weeks, months or years, and go, wow, I don't know where that energy came from, but it was what we needed to get this stuff established yesterday.
I was that force from the outside that had the vision and the training and the skills and the tools and the freedom and the perspective, to be able to have a fresh perspective and have fresh energy and to help shed light on those blind spots.
And just organize the process and be a good conductor of time and energy and respecting where people are at and what time and energy they have to devote.
That's part of the designer's questionnaire. Any, any site that you will work on, you would go through that checklist. I designed a custom checklist of sorts, where you interview clients.
Let's understand this. What do you wanna have going on? And how many hours a week do you wanna apply yourself? So I know not to bite off more than I can chew, and to serve moderate servings of what people are gonna have to put on their plate, because a lot of people's plates are already full.
So you show up and you go, let's do all this stuff and transform everything. And it actually becomes a headache or burdensome, or it's just beyond the scope of time that people have to do gardening as a hobby.
So they would need someone to live in and maintain, establish and maintain and develop and troubleshoot, etc.
Whatever is being installed. A point to make is why I like to rely on very robust and resilient self cleaning, self maintaining ecological systems, not so much a lot of artificial plastic, synthetic, lots of moving parts, lots of points of failure, or more like single points of failure on lots of moving parts or systems that are just technical and mechanical. They're not, they're unforgiving, like aquaponic systems versus an ecosystem pond will be one area where establishing a pure natural ecology that does all of its own work is to me preferable to a bunch of parts that can break. If one of them breaks the whole system dies.
So just some thoughts there on cultivating and harvesting the energy and the drive and the focus.
Hopefully anyone who's out there in this field, you know what I'm talking about, and you go, wow, I see this place, and I see the potential, and I see the the pain points. And we're talking about the pain points, and it's a dialogue.
And then you just wanna, for your own sake, and for their sake, get as many of those important basic survival need meeting systems in place as fast as you can comfortably, without causing friction with personalities or with budgets.
That's why you can be a hero and a rock star if you can make aesthetic upcycling on site with the materials that are there.
And that's what I take the most pride in. You can't always guarantee that the plantings are gonna do well in the soil that's barely been touched in years, or that's compacted, or toxic or whatever.
You can't be certain that all of your horticultural efforts are going to bear fruit even.
But what you can be certain of is building the hard scape, doing the infrastructure in a way that is ergonomic and flows with the patterns of life and and that is beautiful and welcoming, and is also conducive to a property being sold.
That’s another factor, a lot of people have to consider as well, I could tolerate the aesthetics of this upcycle thing you built, but I gotta be thinking about, what about selling it in the future or renting it or whatever?
Are people going to feel the way I do about it?
It's this rustic, charming sort of aesthetic that not everybody's gonna share.
So there's, of course, factors like that. So then can it be built to be compliant with everyone's aesthetic tastes, maybe?
Or if not, can it be disassembled and gotten rid of without it being a burden to the client?
I’ve had situations before where someone was thrilled about something I installed for a minute, and then once it became burdensome on their lifestyle, then they thought of it as a nuisance and eyesore, and they resented me for even bringing it in the first place.
That was a friend, and it was a gift, but they ended up resenting it because they told me they had to clean it up, they had to remove it themselves, and they ended up falling out of love with it.
So again, it's like cradle to grave maintenance to do any of this stuff.
It's a habit of mind to say, okay, maybe we did all these things, and it was great, and we established all these things. But I may never be back, or I may come back soon. I may come back later. What have I done here that you would like to have removed before I leave?
Just so you never have to think about it.
Is there anything that I moved or changed or that I'm leaving behind?
Because I want a clean conscience with all this stuff. That's what matters to me. One of the things that matters the most is making sure that I help permaculture have a good name wherever I go. Not another black eye, because that happens too often. Where we give ourselves a black eye.
So hopefully that's some good energy, some good, positive vibes. And I hope you kind of reconnect with that invigoration, either on your own property or if you're working on other people's properties, and see through that lens and put that hat on of the urgency to get the survival needs optimizing and scaled up.