Ethics of Permaculture
Ethics act as constraints on survival instincts and other personal and social constructs of self interest that tend to drive human behaviour. (David Holmgren - Essence of Permaculture)
3 Permaculture Ethics:
Earth Care - the focus to rebuild the nature’s capital i.e. taking care of the land and environment that we live in.
People Care - how we can nurture ourselves, our family and community in a better way of living and co-existing.
Fair Share - provide us with the motivation to responsibly set limits to what we consume and reproduce (avoid waste). Also how we can share the surplus that we generate.
Pic: Rambutan tree
Earth Care
It guides us to minimise impact of our daily activity to the environment. This where we can opt for 3R - reduce, reuse and recycle. Other permaculture practitioners have even extended their 3R with the practice of refuse (wastage & non-environmentally items), repair (rather than throw away old or broken materials) and upcycle the items that they have.
At Ekar Lui, we try our best to reduce waste by only planting what we need, reuse the materials that we have e.g. old tyres as garden bed and recycle as much as we can. In addition, we tried to save energy consumption via the farm house design e.g. opt for LED lightings, higher ceiling for better air flow etc.
More importantly, how do we educate our family and Ekar Lui Farm School students to be aware and take responsibility to take care of our planet.
People Care
Taking care of ourselves, families and other people by understanding and addressing their needs. Engaging them as much as we can to understand the challenges of our families and local community so that we can help and work with them.
We have experienced the challenges faced during Covid-19 lockdown where our neighbours could not sell their farm produce to customers. Leveraging on the digital platform and careful review of the supply chain impediments, we took the following steps:
strategy: sold the farm produce directly to customers via home delivery
identified the target customers - purchasing power and product delivery preference.
premium pricing - selected high quality produce so that we can sell at slightly premium price (for their profit) and customer satisfaction (product quality & comfort of home delivery). And also able to pay delivery people who actually lost their jobs during covid.
end-to-end supply chain management - from farm to table which attracts the customers to pay for direct purchase as there is no long storage period for the fresh produce. Helped the farmers resolved their problem of not being able to sell their produce at roadside. And also helped the delivery people to get some job.
We continue to engage our neighbours and local community for help and support e.g.
our community worked together to replace the old wooden bridge with concrete bridge
worked on the water supply piping and distribution so that all our neighbours could get sufficient supply of natural water etc.
Alerting others when the water rise during rainy season as we are living in flood prone area.
Fair Share
We personally love this ethic as we reflect upon how we work with our neighbours on ‘redistribution of surplus’. We frequently get requests for durians, rambutans and manages during fruit season. As our farm can only managed to produce limited supply, we always get good supply from our neighbours to meet the customers’ requests.
Other practices:
Seeds and seedlings exchange and sharing amongst our local community. And most important, the exchange of knowledge to grow the plants amongst us.
Distributed our overgrown plants e.g. `pucuk manis’ plants to families and friends so that they can replant the shoots for food source.
This ethic also provide us with the discipline of planning and observing our planting so as to minimise waste and help others.
Living together and appreciating the contribution as a community made us believe that we made the right decision to live at Sg Lui and able to extend the warmth of Fair Share to our families and friends outside our neighbourhood.
Permaculture has indeed provided us with a new realisation of how we could live sustainably by working and enriching others. We know that we have just began this permaculture journey but we enjoy educating ourselves and others.
Next: Design and implement the Permaculture Principles.
