What do you have? What do you need?

I consider myself a permaculturalist. I'm not certified, as the cla**** are long and expensive and far away. Sometimes I have the time but not the money, other times I have the money but not the time. So it goes. I've gotten a fair bit of practice in my own lawn, but I've spent far less time working than I've spent reading. So I probably haven't earned the title, but I use it anyway.

One of the key concepts of permaculture is that your homestead is an ecosystem, and each plant, animal, structure, terrain feature and person is a component of that system. Each of these components has Needs, things it requires to continue to exist. Each one also has byproducts, things it produces. Many also have behaviors, which are a special kind of byproduct that are verbs instead of nouns. For example, let us take a chicken. A chicken needs shelter, water, food, dust, grit, air, and other chickens to keep it company. It produces eggs, feathers, meat, manure, methane, and CO2. Its behaviors include scratching the dirt for food, flying, fighting, etc. Every component of your homestead has needs and byproducts, though being from an engineering background I like to call them inputs and outputs.

That alone isn't a grand insight. What follows is, so I'm gonna bold it. Any unmet need is more work for you. All needs eventually have to be met, or else the component ceases to function (the chicken dies). If the system you've set up doesn't meet all the needs of the component, you, the maintainer of the system, will have to do it yourself. Any unused byproduct is pollution. If the manure from the chicken is used to fertilize a garden, it's a resource. If it's left unused, it's a smelly mess you have to clean up or live with. And here's the big one, so it gets it's own paragraph break

A well designed system meets as many of it's component's inputs as possible with outputs from other parts of the system.

This means that the system as a wh*** will require as little work from you as possible, while producing as few pollutants as possible. Of course the perfect system has everything met by it's components, but no such system exists. Even the earth taken as a wh*** depends on energy input from the sun, which in the long term is a non-renewable resource. But It's a nice goal to work towards.

Why isn't this post titled "Permaculture design" then? Because this strategy of matching input to output is also the secret to collaboration between groups, or "superstructing." All of us here are full of ideas on how to change the world for the better, and we're looking for people to help us. Each one of us is bringing different resources to the table. Each idea has things it needs before it can come to fruition, and each idea will produce resources when online. In order to connect these projects into a wh***, to see what kind of system we are creating, we should look at each project's inputs and outputs. And every pollutant is an underutilized resource waiting for something useful to be done with it.

Say your project is windmills. You need a lot of things. Maybe someone else's project is reducing unemployment among former factory workers. These guys have skills you need. Someone else is trying to clean up their neighborhood of derelict cars. Those are alternators and scrap metal you can use. A nearby homesteader planted some bamboo but it's growing faster than they can use it, and they are just throwing out the excess. There is your scaffolding.

Think for a long time about all the byproducts of your work, too. The windmills obviously provide energy, either mechanical or electrical. But those towers holding them aloft can also provide trellises for climbing vines, shade, and watch towers over the surrounding area. You can put signage on them, too, and use them for radio antenna.

Someone, somewhere has what you need to finish your project. You have something that someone, somewhere needs to finish theirs. Collaboration is finding each other and matching input to output, until we get as near as possible to our perfect closed system. And it starts by making a list of what you need and what you produce, and then sharing it. I challenge each of you to make such a list for every project you propose and work on, and share it with everyone. Lets find each other.