Permaculture Principle #7: 'Design from Patterns to Details'

"Design like nature; think big, act small."

Pattern Thinking

Basically, pattern thinking is all about looking at the big picture before diving into the nitty-gritty details.

Imagine you're trying to solve a puzzle. Instead of immediately focusing on each tiny piece, you step back and first look at the overall picture. That's the idea here.

Let's say you're designing a garden. Instead of immediately deciding which plants to put where, you'd take a moment to observe the natural patterns around you.

How does the sunlight move throughout the day? Where does water naturally flow? By understanding these bigger patterns, you can create a garden that works with nature instead of against it.

And it's not just about gardens. Pattern thinking applies to all sorts of things, like how cities are laid out or how businesses operate.

By recognizing patterns in different situations, you can learn from them and apply those lessons elsewhere.

One of the cool things about pattern thinking is that it lets you be really creative. You can take what you've learned from one situation and apply it in a totally different context. It's like using analogies to solve problems.

Consider the organized chaos within a beehive. Each bee has a specific role to play, whether it's collecting nectar, caring for larvae, or defending the hive.

Despite the bustling activity, bees communicate effectively and work together seamlessly to achieve their common goals.

Now, think about the dynamics of teamwork in an office setting. By observing the structured organization and communication patterns within a beehive, we can learn valuable lessons about collaboration and task allocation.

Patterns in Space and Time

So you know how in nature, you have these micro things happening, like fungi breaking down a fallen log.

But then you can also zoom out and see the whole forest ecosystem operating over decades and centuries.

Well, permaculture says we need to be aware of patterns at all those different scales - from the tiny to the huge.

It's kind of like looking through different zoom levels on a map app. At the most zoomed in level, you might just see a single garden bed.

But then zooming out, you see how that bed fits into the whole garden layout and zoning system.

Keep zooming out more and you start seeing how that garden relates to the larger landscape and watershed around it.

So those micro mushroom decomposers? They live and die in a matter of weeks or months. Zooming back to the whole forest? That's operating over a millenia timescale for its full lifecycles.

Being able to recognize that kind of "space-time hierarchy" is clutch for permaculture design.

It helps you properly situate things in your design - like putting the annual vegetables in the right space and the orchards and food forests in the right wider-range spaces matching their scale.

Spatial and Time Scales

Let me break down what is meant by different spatial and time scales in permaculture design:

Spatial Scales:

• Micro - This refers to very small, localized areas like a garden bed, compost pile, or tiny ecosystem niche.
• Small - Looking at the level of a home garden, backyard, or single zone.
• Medium - Talking about the scale of a larger property, neighborhood, or small watershed.
• Large - This encompasses a whole farm, village, or catchment basin.
• Landscape - The biggest spatial scale looks at entire landscapes, valleys, or bioregions.

Time Scales:

• Rapid - Events or processes that happen quickly like daily, weekly, or over a single season.
• Short-term - Things playing out over months to a few years.
• Medium-term - Processes taking 5-20 years to unfold.
• Long-term - Looking at timescales of decades or centuries.
• Geological - The longest time scale considers forces reshaping the earth over millennia or longer.

The key is being able to recognize patterns at all these nested spatial and temporal scales, from the very micro and rapid, all the way up to the massive landscape level and geological timescales.

Self-Organizing Landscape Patterns

Basically, it's the idea that if you really observe the natural landscape around us, you start to notice these recurring patterns in how energy, water, and nutrients move and accumulate.

For example, think about areas along a river or stream - the vegetation and fertility is always richer there compared to the surrounding drier areas, right?

That's because the water flow concentrates nutrients and seeds in those riparian zones over time.

Or have you ever noticed how in the bush, there always seem to be patches of dense vegetation concentrated in some areas, while other areas are more sparse and degraded?

That's another self-organized pattern based on how nutrients and water move cyclically to create these alternating zones of growth and depletion at the landscape level.

The really cool part is that permaculture isn't about fighting these natural patterns, but design principles that actually work WITH them and even amplify them intentionally.

So instead of just blindly developing an area, good permaculture designers will map out these self-organized hotspots of abundance and try to mimic them with their systems.

Zones, Sectors and Scales

Zones are basically a way to organize your landscape based on how intensely an area is used or managed. Zone 0 is your actual house. Zone 1 is the area right outside that gets the most intense use and management - like your annual veggie beds.

As the zones increase in number, the level of hands-on management decreases. So Zone 4 might be a semi-wild tree crop area you interact with very little.

Sectors refer to the directional flows and influences entering your site - things like the sun path, prevailing winds, wildfire risk directions, etc.

Mapping these sectors helps you organize your zones to best take advantage of or protect against these flows. Like putting your greenhouse to maximize south-facing sun exposure.

The scales concept recognizes that different types of systems and elements operate most efficiently at different physical scales.

A small 1,000 sq ft annual veggie garden is about the right scale before you need to shift strategies for a larger market garden. An orchard might work best from 1-5 acres, but much bigger than that requires a plantation-style approach.

So in your design, you're aiming to nest and arrange all the right elements at their appropriate scales across the contoured zones, while accounting for how the sectors influence those spaces.

Like your annual beds in a Zone 1 sun trap, but your firewood trees on the Zone 3 wildfire buffer sector.

The goal is essentially creating a productive landscape organized by nested scales, efficient energy flows, and the degree of human intervention - analogous to how nature stacks functions at multiplescales. It avoids the inefficiencies of trying to upscale a system beyond its appropriate limits.

Catching and Storing Patterns

You know how when it rains really hard, the water has to go somewhere? It doesn't just soak in everywhere evenly.

It starts concentrating and flowing along little rills and channels, creating streams and rivers with that branching, dendritic pattern.

Well, permaculture says we should be designing our landscapes and even our buildings to mimic and work with those same natural catchment flow patterns.

It's all about catching and allowing the energies and resources to accumulate in the right places.

Take water for example - the permaculture approach would be to map where the natural water flows and areas of concentration form after a heavy rain.

You'd then site things like swales, ponds, and plantings to take advantage of that pattern. Letting the water soak in and accumulate fertility and complexity in those designated zones.

The indigenous got this big time - they'd create their maximally productive gardens and even villages in those riparian zones along rivers where all the nutrients get deposited annually.

Or situate their more intense agriculture on slopes and floodplains that caught the heavier nutrient inflows.

Permaculture design is less about halting and controlling natural flows, but rather skillfully riding and benefitting from them in our layouts.

You observe where the energies want to go, concentrate and diffuse - then cleverly position your elements to work WITH that pattern.

Vernacular Aesthetic Motifs

You know how every region and culture around the world has developed its own unique architectural styles and building traditions over time?

Well, according to permaculture, those vernacular designs aren't just aesthetic flourishes - they actually emerged as functional adaptations to the local climate, materials, and patterns of that particular place.

Now, that's not to say there wasn't also artistic expression at play too. But the idea is that any enduring vernacular style first had to prove itself as being grounded in authentic problem-solving for that locale and its patterns.

Mere novelty or artistic caprice without that rooted practicality would have been filtered out over the generations.

The exciting prospect is that as we redesign for a sustainable future, paying attention to these classic vernacular motifs can give us a jumpstart on appropriate patterning and detailing.

Rather than just chasing stylistic trends, we can draw inspiration from the already-evolved building languages of place. It's like having thousands of years of beta-testing data at our fingertips! Pretty powerful if you ask me.

Conclusion

You know, when it comes down to it, this "design from patterns" principle is all about opening our eyes to the lessons nature has to offer.

Instead of just looking at the details, we need to step back and observe the bigger patterns at play - whether it's how landscapes organize themselves, how energy and resources flow and cycle, or how different scales and timeframes interact.

By really studying and understanding these patterns, we can then apply that wisdom to create permaculture designs that work in harmony with nature's principles.

It helps us avoid getting overly fixated on little details and make sure we're aligned with sustainable, holistic patterns from the start.

At the end of the day, it's about seeing the forest for the trees - literally and metaphorically! Makes a whole lot of sense when you think about it that way.

References

1. "Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability" by David Holmgren

2. Certain images in this article were created using AI.