 Hello again. This month's question is, how can I use permaculture thinking to design something like a livelihood for myself? So the nice thing about permaculture is that whilst we initially might think that it's best applied to food growing, because of course we learn how does nature work, what are the principles of success of nature. It's very easy to take those principles of success of things like each element has many functions or each function is supported by many elements or diversity and beneficial relationship setting those things up. It's very easy to take those things, those principles from nature and apply them to a kind of a managed natural system of food production. Whereas if we start saying how do we apply these principles to the way we live and personally ourselves where how do I make a livelihood and that might at first sound like it's a bit trickier and I suppose to some degree maybe there's a little bit more thinking involved but if we start taking those same principles and applying them to something like how do we make a financial income because most of us do live in a money system and we earn money in order to pay for things because we are quite separated up very often from the people we trade with that maybe we would only ever do a one-way exchange with somebody I need something they've made it but they live 200 miles away and they post it to me and we never have an opportunity to meet in person for me to do something for them in exchange so money allows us to bypass those inequalities and make a fair exchange in the moment. So we earn money so the first thing I would say with the pomecoge design is that there's two aspects to that so with any system whether we're looking at food production in the garden or collecting water maybe for us to use directly or to use in the garden you have your inputs your inflow and you have your outputs or your outflow and in systems thinking this is the stock and flow diagram you have what comes in then you have your stock and what goes out and that might be the stock of food in the garden so your inputs are sun and water and nutrients and so on and then the outflow from the garden some of it comes to us so it becomes an input to our system our body system and then there are outputs for that and of course in our modern systems most of the things we use come through pipes and cables and supermarket delivery lorries and they disappear off in the form of heat or down flush toilet pipes and that kind of thing so there's two approaches to if we need more of something then we can either look to get more of it or we could reduce our losses and we can use the same approach to of course not just fertility in the garden that how do we retain fertility in the garden by cycling nutrients that might otherwise be wasted compost and maybe human urine and so on but we can also look at the spending in the same way so we could earn more or we could spend less or have less loss so i would certainly approach it from that perspective of if we're doing more things for ourselves than we need buy less now of course if you're growing food for yourself in the modern context we can't really make a good argument for hell that's a good idea from a financial perspective because the price of carrots of potatoes for instance in the supermarket even if they're organic is a fraction of the time that you would spend to do those things if you were to then use that time to say do it or something and earn 15-20 pounds an hour so the food we grow from the perspective that the time we spend on it is expensive but of course it's not just about the quantity of the food it's about the quality and so for me growing your own food is a hugely important thing because it connects me to the land it provides something for my body which is much more healthy than much of what i might be able to buy from elsewhere so we can save money by doing certain things for ourselves of course there's many things that that we spend without realizing so a classic thing now is the direct debit so it used to be that a bill would come through the post and you would look at it and say oh my god look at all the money we spent on electricity we might need to be a bit more careful about switching off lights and someone and i particularly noticed this when i was teaching on sarc last summer um on basically on the islands of channel island and their electricity comes from one power station which is fueled by diesel which comes on a boat from guernsey and from further afield and so they're paying four five six times as much for their electricity as we pay on the mainland and so when we go over there there's this very interesting dynamic where the locals are switching off all the lights and trying to be really careful with electricity because it's so expensive and the people that go there have no concept of how much more expensive it is so they're using electricity as if it was so much more cheap and then also wondering why it's more expensive to go off to a bmb on sarc because they're not appreciating that they're using more power and that's costing the the proprietor more money to to do it so um there's that general awareness of where are we leaking and of course direct debits were a very smart idea framed in the idea that it's going to save us time and energy because we don't have to think about writing out a check and all of that but in the past we used to get that bit of information that suddenly made us think hang on a sec look at all the money we've spent whereas now we don't even see that number it flicks past in our bank account and we barely notice it let alone start thinking maybe i should do something differently so firstly i would say be much better at monitoring where the money goes and that would be the same for anything that we're looking at nutrients and someone in the garden leaks of water from our water bottle the gutter that overflows and doesn't fill the water back properly all of those things they're opportunities to collect something that's being lost so where are our leaks in the system so where are the leaks in the feeding in system but also where are the leaks in the system going out where am i losing time which might be earning me an opportunity for me to earn money where am i losing money because i'm spending on other things i'm not even really noticing about what i don't need by reducing that need for financial income immediately we can start to claw some of our life back and do things perhaps we enjoy doing because a livelihood is not just about how we earn money it's about um do we enjoy our life what's the quality of life that we have and our world has focused this so much now on to and more and more money so that you someday you could retire and enjoy it and many people get to that point and don't live a very much longer because they've exhausted themselves so for me part of my quality of life is how much do i need to earn and then pitch it about that level i don't need to be earning huge amounts of money because i've pitched my lifestyle at that place it's also worth thinking about um where you're earning your income from so you may have a primary job some many of us only have one job and of course that puts us at risk in the same way as the farmer who is selling to a supermarket his entire crop goes to the supermarket then if the supermarket turns around and says actually it's not quite up to standard we don't want it then they're stuck because they've got no way to sell that it's much more difficult for them to market that so it's the eggs in one basket situation and many of us find ourselves in that situation in the modern world so in nature we find a diversity uh that each important function is met by um many elements so i teach and i earn a significant chunk of my income from teaching um i do have it to go back to if i need to but i haven't had to do that i get a bit of income from royalties from my book um i'm starting to do a little bit with online courses and i also have a very small scale retail business so all of these things sort of sit side by side and it's very interesting how when one of them kind of eases off a little bit another one will pick up so there's diversity in that and it's also worth looking at where do we earn a living because um there's something called the hierarchy of needs which was simplified by a guy called Clayton Aldifer a little while ago to three levels and the basic level is uh the base level is existence it's expressed as a triangle you have existence that's meeting our physical needs like our food and water and energy and shelter and that kind of thing and on top of that then there is uh relatedness that's all about how do we interact with each other and then on top of that is growth and the the essence of it is that if we're hungry or we're thirsty or we're cold then that's the thing that dominates that's the thing that we need to deal with whereas when we're we're meeting all those needs and we're comfortable then we're looking at how the you know whatever our relationships with people i need to hang out with people build those relationships and once we feel safe in the social sense then what is it that i'm here to do so if we think about where we make a livelihood or where we make a living where we earn money then we can also say where does it sit in that triangle so if you're a supermarket you're basically selling at the level of existence and uh because we don't value food so much anymore then what's happening there is that you've got to basically sell a lot of food with small margins to earn money and that's why it's difficult for small scale organic permaculture growers to make a serious living because we don't value food anymore and we don't really want to pay too much above the basic level even if it's a really much better quality if you're operating at the level of growth then ironic sort of food and growth but growth for human growth and so on then there's a potential to make quite a lot of money at that level because um you know that's your entrepreneur and so on but at the same time when a recession comes along a financial problem most people stop spending at the level of growth they stop going to the cinema and buying dvds and new computers and so on and focus on we need to pay the rent we need to buy food so if you operate at the top of the triangle then you're actually potentially vulnerable there so it's it's useful to think about where is your poly income coming from and to spread it across those three areas interestingly as a permaculture teacher with some gardening skill then i can grow food and i can teach people how to grow food to some degree not as good as some not as well as some people can um but that's the level of existence so i can make a living for myself i can be valued by society at that level but also teaching permaculture courses is at the top of the triangle so and i would say some degree in the middle because it's also about bringing people together and creating networks of people so look to pitch your livelihoods in those three different levels if you can because that will also give you resilience and there's also different approaches that we can use for different design frameworks as we call them including one that libya maknamara developed called the design web and she's very much been applying that to social design social landscape and that's been very successful way of looking at designing things like livelihoods but really i think what i would say is rather than just tell you a whole bunch of stuff is just start thinking about there are ethics there are principles um how can we apply those principles because essentially a financial income is still the same system it's still inputs there's a stock and then there's an output in the same way that there is in a garden or a water butt system or an electricity supply system with your solar panels and your battery bank and so on so just do a bit of thinking for yourself and if you're really interested we also ran a course about designing your own ethical livelihood which you can find out more about on the website