Permaculture Principle #10: 'Use and Value Diversity'
"Sail in many boats."
Diversity in Nature
Have you ever gone for a hike in the woods or explored a forest? If you have, you'd notice it's teeming with life in all shapes, sizes, and forms. Tall trees, small shrubs, ferns, mushrooms, insects, birds.
This diversity is really the backbone that allows these ecosystems to thrive. Each species has its own unique role to play, occupying different niches.
The trees provide shelter and food for the birds and insects. The fungi and microbes break down dead matter, recycling nutrients. The diversity ensures there are multiple pathways for the ecosystem to function.
Even within a single species, there's mind-boggling genetic diversity. Like, you can have dozens of varieties of oak trees, each adapted to specific soil conditions, climates etc.
This intra-species diversity acts as insurance - if some variety can't cope with a new pest or environmental stress, others in the population may survive.
You'll also find diversity in the age of organisms - from seedlings to ancient giants. The older trees act as resilient anchors, while the youngsters come up and replace ones that die off.
Diversity in Agriculture
You know how our grandparents used to grow all sorts of crops together in their little backyard plots? Tomatoes next to corn, beans climbing up the corn stalks, a row of radishes here, some lettuce over there.
That technique is called polyculture - growing multiple crops intermixed instead of in pure stands. It may seem counterintuitive, but this diversity is actually what kept those garden plots so healthy and resilient.
The differing crops wouldn't all get wiped out by the same pest or disease. Their varied root systems and canopies cooperated rather than competed for nutrients and sunlight.
Our ancestors understood diversity equaled security. By maintaining all those weird heirloom varieties of vegetables, grains, livestock too, they ensured their food supply could withstand droughts, cold snaps or whatever else nature threw their way.
Then the modern agriculture system came along with its monoculture mind virus - the obsession withking-size yields from single high-bred hybrid crops. We sacrificed biological diversity across the board for sheer productivity.
Well, it seemed efficient at first until the pests adapted and the soils became degraded from the chemicals needed to prop up those mono-cultures.
The truth is, if you want a truly sustainable self-reliant food source, you need that diversity.
A polyculture garden or farm with numerous interlocked crops, different seasonal varieties, and heritage seeds/livestock breeds is your best insurance policy.
Conventional thinking says simplify for control, but ecology actually thrives on complexity.
Diversifying your production streams and having numerous yields is the best way to meet your needs reliance while working harmoniously with nature's model.
Cultural and Linguistic Diversity
Have you ever traveled somewhere totally different from home and felt like you were on another planet? The food, clothes, music, customs - everything seems so unique and specific to that place.
That's because human cultures evolved intimately intertwined with their local environments and bioregions over thousands of years. The landscapes, climates, plants, and animals available in an area shaped the traditions, beliefs, and lifestyles of the people inhabiting it.
This diversity is truly mind-blowing when you think about it. There are over 6,000 languages spoken around the world, each one carrying the unique worldview, oral histories, and traditional ecological knowledge of its people.
Due to globalization and the spread of modern consumer culture, entire ways of life, accumulated wisdom over millennia, is blinking out forever as communities are disrupted and folks trade in traditional lifeways for blue jeans and burgers.
That's why this idea of multiculturalism and creating new "cultures of place" is so important.
Instead of just melting everything into one giant corporate monoculture, we need to cultivate a tapestry where diverse cultural threads are woven together in new patterns, specific and adapted to the places we live now.
Diversity in Communities and Economies
It seems counter-intuitive, but true community resilience often comes from embracing diversity rather than just putting together a bunch of like-minded people.
Think about it - if you have an intentional community made up solely of families with young kids, or retirees, or whatevers, they're all going to have pretty similar needs and backgrounds.
But combine people of different ages, skillsets, cultures even, and suddenly you get this rich fabric of interdependence.
I think we're seeing a kind of similar dynamic play out in the wider economy as mass production and mass markets fragment into all these niche subcultures and markets.
People want personalized experiences, unique identities and choices tailored to their interests.
And having diversified income streams and skills is key for self-reliance too nowadays, with so much change and uncertainty always afoot.
Can't count on a single job or business to provide forever. The more divergent ways you can pieces together your livelihood, the more resilient you'll be.
Strategies for Rebuilding Diversity
You know how we were talking about the importance of diversity in natural systems and traditional agriculture?
Well, the tough part is how do we actually regenerate that diversity after it's been decimated by industrial monocultures?
One strategy is to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks - introduce all kinds of new plant species and varieties to your system through trial and error, without being too selective upfront. Let nature do its own pruning.
Maintaining the diversity we do have left is crucial too. Like preserving heritage crop varieties and rare livestock breeds that still carry old resilient traits bred out of modern commercial stock.
Stacking functions of plants from canopy to groundcover, incorporating animals, using zone and sector analysis to create productive micro-environments.
The name of the game is basically replicating nature's ingenuity across all levels. Whereas industrial agriculture tries to purely simplify and control, permaculture embraces complexity as the sustaining force.
Balancing Diversity and Productivity
On one hand, nature thrives on diversity right? You look at an old-growth forest and it's teeming with all sorts of plants, insects, animals, fungi - a vibrant interrelated tapestry.
But then you also see examples of nature favoring outright productivity in certain cases. Like after a forest fire, when just a few pioneering species take over and proliferate rapidly to get the regenerative succession started.
This tension between diversification and optimization for sheer productivity is something we have to consciously balance in our cultivated systems too.
Take my vegetable garden for instance. When I first started, I went a little overboard - trying to cram in every exotic plant I could find. It was vibrant chaos, but not very efficient or high-yielding.
So lately, I've been doing some selective "culling" - focusing on the varieties that really thrive for me, produce abundantly, and store well.
But I'm keeping just enough diversity cultivated to maintain that ecological resilience too.
Having too much of a monoculture makes the whole system vulnerable to diseases, pests, or volatile conditions.
But having unrestrained diversity can also reduce yields. You want to strike that balance.
It's all about creating a dynamic system that's highly productive for your needs, but still displays that diversity of form, function, and regenerative ability that natural systems exhibit.
Kinda like channeling nature's design principles at an appropriately small scale.
Conclusion
Diversity is everywhere in nature and has allowed life to thrive through resilience and adaptability.
In our gardens and farms, incorporating a mix of crops, animals, and practices provides insurance against problems and makes the system more self-reliant.
Even in our communities and cultures, diversity brings vibrancy, fresh perspectives, and opportunities for exchange.
While too much uniform sameness is fragile, thoughtfully maintained diversity creates strength, abundance, and continuity amidst change.
Permaculture teaches us to embrace diversity as a core strategy for designing sustainable systems that provide for our needs over the long haul.
References
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"Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability" by David Holmgren
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"Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" by Bill Mollison
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Certain images in this article were created using AI.