Permaculture Principle #9: 'Use Small and Slow Solutions'

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." - Lao Tzu

Use Small Solutions

So the basic idea is that instead of going big, we should aim for systems that function at the smallest practical scale that still gets the job done well without wasting tons of energy.

Think about it - most of the really essential stuff we do day-to-day, like cooking, cleaning, gardening, fixing things around the house, totally works better when it's human-sized and human-powered rather than being this huge industrial operation.

It's kind of like how you can easily whip up a meal for yourself in your own kitchen, but running a massive restaurant kitchen to make that same meal would require so much more energy, equipment, and hassle.

Another key part of this principle is minimizing how much we need to constantly move materials and people from place to place. The more stuff has to get shipped across the world, the more energy gets wasted in transportation.

Same goes for ourselves - all that commuting and traveling we do burns through resources like crazy. But if we can meet more of our needs locally through small self-reliant systems, we automatically increase our autonomy and resilience.

I'm trying to apply this principle in my own life bit by bit. Like growing some veggies in my backyard, trying to shop from local businesses, even just walking or biking more instead of driving everywhere.

Energetic Limits and Scale

Basically, there's an inherent trade-off when it comes to the size and speed of things because of energy constraints.

It's like, you can have something big and bulky that moves slowly, or something small and agile that can move really fast, but you can't have both at the same time without using up a crazy amount of energy

Think about it - a giant cruise ship is massive but it moves at a snail's pace. On the other hand, something small like a speedboat can zoom around really fast.

But try to make that cruise ship move at speedboat speeds, and you'd need an insane amount of fuel and power to overcome that bulk.

It's the same sort of principle in nature. Like, an elephant is this huge, lumbering beast, while an antelope is relatively tiny but can run circles around the elephant. The natural world has found the energetic sweet spots.

And when you look closer, you see that the building blocks of life itself follow this "small is powerful" pattern. Individual cells are these tiny units, but they can multiply and replicate to grow into massive structures and life forms.

At an individual level, pretty much no cell or organism can just keep growing and growing indefinitely without using up way more energy than is feasible.

So when you put it all together, it makes you realize that there are universal energetic laws around size, speed, and growth that we've kind of ignored or tried to defy with our human systems.

But that's not going to fly forever as energy constraints become more real. Maybe slowing down and thinking smaller is the smarter long-term play!

Slow-Growth Farming

Think about how most industrial farming ops try to maximize growth rates and get livestock to processing weight as quickly as possible through intensive feedlot systems.

But there's a lot of downsides to that approach - you end up with low-quality meat full of water and fat instead of nutrients, the animals are pumped full of hormones and drugs, and you have all these ethical issues.

Go slower and lower-stress rather than pushing maximumpossible growth rates. The animals stay healthier, the products are better nutritionally, and it's just a more sustainable.

Pasture-based cows fertilize soil naturally with manure, enriching it with nutrients. They aerate the soil by trampling, aiding plant growth. Rotational grazing prevents overgrazing and lowers parasite risk, leading to healthier pastures.

Chickens

So, you know how most of the eggs you find at the grocery store come from these massive industrial farms? The chickens are usually kept in really tight spaces, with hardly any room to move around.

It's like they're living in chicken apartments, but not the nice kind—it’s cramped, and they often can't even spread their wings. This setup helps industrial farms produce eggs really quickly and cheaply, but it's not the best for the chickens.

Now, compare that to free-range chickens. These birds are basically living the chicken dream. They get to roam around outside, pecking at the ground, chasing bugs, and doing all the chicken things they love to do.

Now, let's talk about the "smaller is better" principle, picture this: instead of having one massive chicken coop on a big farm, every house has a small chicken coop in their vegetable garden.

It's like having mini-farms everywhere, and it's a pretty clever way to do things. Let me break down why it's awesome and how it works.

First off, having lots of little chicken coops means you don't need to transport chickens or eggs over long distances. You know how much energy is wasted on transportation, right?

Trucks burning fuel to get products from point A to point B. But with chickens in every garden, you're cutting out the need for all that travel. You just step outside to collect fresh eggs from your own backyard.

When you have smaller chicken coops spread across different locations, the whole system is more immune to problems.

Like, if one coop has an issue with a predator or a disease outbreak, it won't affect the whole network. It's kind of like having a backup plan, but for chickens.

Chickens are like little gardeners. They scratch the soil, which helps aerate it, and their droppings are a fantastic natural fertilizer. It’s like having your own organic composting system on-site.

When you rotate them around your garden, they can help control pests too. Chickens love eating bugs, so they can keep those pesky insects from wrecking your veggies.

Energetic Descent

Think about it - our whole modern civilization was built on cheap, abundant fossil fuels. That allowed us to construct these giant, complex systems for everything from cities to factories to transportation networks.

But those behemoth systems were really only possible because we could throw virtually unlimited amounts of energy at them.

And that energy? It was millions of years' worth of accumulated sunlight, transformed into oil, coal, and natural gas. This ancient energy, stored deep underground, powered our rapid growth and technological leaps.

But it's finite, and when it runs out, it won't replenish for millions of years. Essentially, we've been using a massive energy reserve that took eons to form, and we've burned through it in a fraction of that time.

The stuff that'll endure and thrive is the small-scale, local, self-reliant systems pulsing at nature's steady rhythms rather than frantic industrial paces.

Vegetable gardens and fruit trees in the streets, backyard chickens, bike paths, and solar panels on rooftops – simple stuff centered on human efforts and closed loops.

That's the trend that aligns with nature's blueprint of small building blocks creating resilient, efficient systems.

Conclusion

This principle about using small and slow solutions is all about keeping things simple and sustainable. Instead of going big and fast, which guzzles up energy, we should aim for human-scale systems that move at nature's relaxed pace.

Whether it's growing food, making stuff, or just living life - small is beautiful and slow is sane. By doing things the small and slow way, we're way more efficient with resources and in sync with how the natural world operates.

Plus, it creates way less waste and destruction compared to the rapid, gigantic, and unsustainable approach we're used to. At the end of the day, embracing smallness and slowness is just plain common sense for a truly sustainable future.

References

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

2. "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" by Bill Mollison

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