 Hello again. So today's question is which of the permaculture principles is the most important? That's a very good question. I would say that all the permaculture principles are important, or we wouldn't have them. Many of the principles that we use in permaculture come from ecology. There's some principles of attitude, the way we see the world, and there's a few principles of energy efficient design. I'd say if we were to come back to nature and the principles of ecology, there are many things that make nature successful and that lead to us looking at those things and saying okay so nature does this, nature is diverse, nature creates relationships, nature you know life moves and so on. How which of those things are most important? I don't know that any are most important but perhaps the most obvious thing when we start to look properly is that cooperation abounds everywhere and our society we're often taught or shown a lot of competition and I think our capitalist society in particular is very much about making you know trying to create competition that we've got to be better than the others and so on. We in order for our business to be successful and such and we tend to not give much attention to the cooperation that occurs and yet if I look in the mirror in the morning I see not just one organism but trillions of cells working together in order to make this body possible this thing that I inhabit is only possible because of that very intricate cooperation those networks that go on and we look around nature and we see those things everywhere. Cooperation makes all multicellular organisms possible without cooperation that you wouldn't see trees or animals or plants or ourselves we would just be single cells floating around and so cooperation for me is key and we see it on so many levels as well so there's cooperation between individuals of the same species so we humans are quite good at working together to solve problems and to help each other meet our needs and we see that within other societies as well whether we're talking about trees or animals or so on. There are co-operations between different species so one of my favourites is birds following herbivores so they might be very often they might be just about eating the parasites that are on the herbivores animals obviously the herbivores are warm and they're producing heat and they have tasty blood and so insects come after them and then so birds will often follow those animals in order to basically pick the bugs off them and we see the same thing happening in the oceans as well with small fish and big fish but there's also insects are attracted to lay their eggs in manure and of course to some degree that's quite logical because then you're quite close to the baby insects you know the new insects will be close to the herbivores because they've basically just been eating their species so birds often follow herbivores because they're eating the larvae that are in the manure as well. We also see a co-operation between different kingdoms so we're probably familiar with animals and plants and fungi are another kingdom and we can see those relationships as well so between trees and fungus plants and fungus for instance we see those in most species of plant has a relationship with a what's called a mycorrhizal fungi a fungus that basically exchanges with them at the root level so the plants provide sugars that the fungus can't make for itself and the fungus is able to create a much more extensive root system that often connects to other plants as well so they can trade and they can also bring up other nutrients from the soil like phosphorus which is very important for plants and sometimes the fungi provide mycotoxins which are a way of the plants helping them defend themselves against so there's different relationships there but basically those relationships occur across different kingdoms as well and we also see across different scales so I've been reading a book called 10% human now I don't know if I'm only 10% human because I've seen different versions of these numbers but essentially many of the bacteria many of the cells in my body are bacterial rather than carrying my own DNA they are things in themselves and they live in my intestinal tract many of those creatures and as long as there's a good relationship there that can be very beneficial for me there are many things I can't digest without the help of those bacteria so I would say if there's one key thing that we should take in terms of a principle is to look at cooperation how do we put things together and this can be one of the misconceptions the things where permaculture can go wrong in the sense that sometimes people will say well I've seen permaculture and it was rubbish it wasn't working and I think what happens is that we come out of we do some permaculture training or we might just watch a couple of videos and say ah permaculture that's about compost toilets and raised beds and maybe a herb spiral so I'll just go and do that and of course actually if you look at nature it's not about the things it's about the relationships between the things and when we create techniques they're about solving problems but what we're trying to do in permaculture is to put things together in the same kind of way that nature assembles systems that function well so it's not about whether a compost toilet well we have a compost toilet but is it appropriate in our landscape does it fit in the landscape where should it go in relation to where I'm moving through the space where I'm going to need that manure and so on and so forth so we need to think beyond the idea of things and think about relationships and cooperation is very much about relationships things go to the places where they have their needs met but also can attract other things that meet their needs in turn so I produce manure and I can't eat that again I need to walk away from that and have something else that will look after that for me and for a tree very much requires a relationship like that because if nothing is eating the leaves that fall from the tree then the tree drowns in its own waste so for me I would say cooperation is key but there are plenty others and they're all important