Making Permaculture Stronger is about to cross a pivotal threshold in its evolution as a project.

Let me explain...

This project launched three and a half years ago with the intention to be...

...a space where permaculture practitioners come together with a spirit of strengthening the design system aspect of permaculture by clarifying its weaknesses and coordinating efforts to address them.

...where...

The best way I know of strengthening something is to identify weak links and then to direct energy toward making them less weak.

An early requirement for the project was to create a framework for thinking about all the different aspects of permaculture. Some way of holding the whole so that weak links could be honed in on and strengthened...

Permaculture Tree (take three)

Remember this? I sure do. I still find it helpful way of mapping out how all permaculture's different aspects sit in relation to one another. I introduced my original illustration here and what follows is a new (draft) version beautifully illustrated by my friend and permaculture illustrator Brenna Quinlan.

Note - the arrows leaving and entering the tree represent permaculture bringing foundational understandings in from outside and creating solutions that go out to become part of other approaches or the culture in general (as isolated things)

To recap the main idea:

permaculture has general foundational aspects that are universal in their relevance (roots)permaculture has specific solutions (design configurations, strategies, and techniques) that are appropriate in some situations and not in others (limbs, branches and leaves)the only thing that can get you from the foundations to the appropriate solutions for a given situation is sound design process (trunk)

I can't resist sharing two further aspects of the tree before I move on, given I just rediscovered Brenna's lovely sketches of them. First, here's a view from above where you might recognise something familiar. Second, the cyclic patterns of movement I'm using the tree to highlight are an instance of the pattern Bill Mollison called the core model.25

Brenna Quinlan's sketches of two additional aspects of the Permaculture Tree (Take Three)

The Original Plan

Having created the original tree diagram, I hatched a cunning plan for the future of Making Permaculture Stronger. I was going to complete, and indeed have completed, a few inquiries myself. Each was to start with something permaculture seemed to have got wrong in terms of design process and end with some better alternative to it. I went so far as to prepare the below plan. I was going to put this out there once I had the ball rolling (as in about now). A diagram to set the parameters to invite others to come play this same game over and over. Together we were going to remedy permaculture's issues, one strengthened weak link at a time..

My early masterplan for Making Permaculture Stronger

Why I started with the Trunk

I spent a few posts explaining why I chose to start my weak-link work in the region of the tree's trunk, as in design process. I described the apparent lack of a deep, coherent, shared, widely used understanding of sound design process in permaculture as a foundational weak link. Foundational in the sense that all sorts of other littler weak links flowed from it. Foundational in the sense of a Type One Error.

Here is how I originally diagramed it, noting that "the image I get is of a huge oak tree teetering on a feeble little stem":

The First Two Inquiries (and where they led me)

I then started the first of two epic, in-depth inquiries where I honed in on problematic aspects of the shared understandings of permaculture design process that were available in the literature. In that sense I identified design process as a weak link then went looking for little weak links within the big weak link that were presumably making the big weak link weak!