Perma Update
October 16, 2008
Lots of reading and more reading. My husband is more into the building side and me, well…I love the plants. We make a good team that way. So here we go, these are the tidbits of our thoughts on what we have learned and do not claim to have it all down yet. Hey, we may even be down right wrong, lol. There is still a long way to travel on this journey to a greener lifestyle.
This week have learned about Entropy. This was one of those unfamiliar words to us and took a while to grasp because of the vocabulary used. Basically its capturing “energy” and making it useful. For example composting your organic wastes. Instead of throwing away those banana peels, kitchen scraps to become useless in the landfill, you compost them creating nutrients for the soil or feed them to some worms that pass it on to the plants. Or like my husband, who collects the scrap lumber they were going to throw away at his job and turns it to something useful. You can of course get more detailed and complex but it is the basic idea.
Functional diversity is also a term we are learning. It is where each thing in the design serves many functions which those elements serve many other functions. “Every function is supported by many elements and every element should support many functions”. The chicken serves many functions, not necessarily in this order but, they provide pest control, fertilizer, they till, they clear, they provide eggs, they eat organic scraps, etc. A chicken house can be attached to a green house. They support each other by creating heat energy. Functional diversity can be applied to most anything. A tree can provide shelter, mulch, food, cycle air and water, home for birds and critters, etc. Everything works together.
Appropriate Scale can also relate to many things. Many of us do not live within the appropriate scale principle. We think bigger is better, when bigger can be worse. Our design should fit within our resources and should take time. “No time to rush” as our instructor would put it. For me, the ending priciple was to create a balance in one’s life and design. We should also prepare for aging or the worse and longevity of the design. You never know when a storm or other unforseen event will occur.
So far it has all been quite interesting. For us it has gone beyond just design. It is starting to touch other parts of our lives feeling a deeper appreciation and understanding of the systems around us that we took for granted.
Now I know what it means to take a moment and appreciate the view. We are always in a rush and don’t realize how beautiful the sky looks or the birds that land in our yard. The way the dragonflies play or how the vines clothe the trees.
I even started to look at the weeds different.
Who started calling them weeds anyway? Looking through the empty lots in our area you see all types of beautiful little “weed” wildflowers that are a butterfly’s heavan. It is true how we seperate ourselves from nature and think we are superior when in fact, we can’t live without it and God created it for a purpose, each with a function and for our enjoyment, not to abuse of it. We are part of nature, we belong to the system. We just need to learn our place.
