When trying to overcome the slug onslaught in my garden last year – or rather: when trying to come to terms with the slug onslaught in my garden last year, because it is very difficult to stop the hungry buggers – I more or less tried to answer the question ‘what would a permaculturist do?’, thereby referring to the works of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. I had a look at the three ethical principles of permaculture, commonly summarised as ‘people care, earth care and fair share’. Although the first two seemed fairly straightforward then, the third one bugged (and bugs – better than slugs) me a bit, in particular the imperative to redistribute surplus. Mollison’s original explanation of the third principle was the rather prohibitive commission of setting limits to population and consumption (Permaculture. A Designers’ Manual, p. 2). Holmgren amended this idea by stating that the third principle wasn’t so much about setting limits, but about redistributing surplus and explained that precisely by setting limits, abundance could be achieved (Permaculture. Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, p. 8-10). Restraint leads to the continued existence of valuable resources and prevents them from being depleted. Those who know about the so-called Tragedy of the Commons will agree with this assessment. However, other than the moral claim that sharing surplus should be encouraged, because it is a way to atone for our sins, Holmgren does not explain where this particular imperative comes from. Since permaculture is in essence about the self-preservation of the human species, I doubted the necessity of sharing surplus for self-preservation, unless one assumes all life systems to function in one big reciprocal circle. If that would be the case, the sequential reasoning of self-preservation being achieved by setting limits in order to create abundance and subsequently sharing that abundance, since the preservation of the one helps the preservation of the other, would make sense.

Upon further reading, it was precisely this premise that got me thinking. Although I was rather sceptical at first, I am increasingly warming to the idea that reciprocity might perhaps be exactly what permaculture and permaculture ethics are about.

In nature, many relationships are indeed reciprocal. ‘It’s the circle of life and it moves us all’, the Disney animals in the Lion King already sang. Autumn leaves feed the soil and provide shelter for animals. Trees that fall down in a storm, fulfil a similar role. The tree itself may have died, but the rotting trunk is still teeming with life, which is the reason just one tree can be regarded an entire ecosystem. Humans are part of that cycle, whether they realise it or not. A traditional, age-old technique used in woodland management is coppicing, the cutting down of trees at the base, so as to encourage new growth, both of the tree itself, as of other plants. Cutting down to the stump allows the tree to redirect its energy to the growth of new shoots rather than maintaining the old trunk. And by cutting down a tree, more light reaches the forest floor which allows other plants to sprout and develop as well. Within the coppiced area, this leads to a larger plant variety, which subsequently has a beneficial effect on the biodiversity as a whole. In her international bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the decline of the black ash (p. 148-149). When investigating the black ash population in New York State, she and a fellow researcher hardly found any saplings, only old trees and seedlings. The only place where saplings where to be found, were the areas where disease or windstorms had brought down old trees and the areas near communities of traditional basket weavers, who use the black ash for their craft. By thinning out the woods in search of craft materials, they enabled light to reach the forest floor, allowing seedlings to develop into saplings. ‘Ash relies on people as the people rely on ash’, Kimmerer writes. ‘Their fates are linked’. When climbing up to the source of the Río Los Cedros in Ecuador, his eyes on the peak of volcano Cotopaxi and his mind on explorer-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Robert Macfarlane came to a similar conclusion. ‘Everything is connected to everything else’, he writes in Is a river alive? (p. 100), ‘relation is life.’

Within the Rights of Nature movement, there is a strong aversion to regarding nature as a mere resource. I can entirely understand that sentiment, since it is this particular attitude that is predominantly responsible for what is called ‘extractivism’, the removal of as many natural resources as possible against the lowest cost possible. Needless to say that this is an economic model with devastating consequences, both environmental and social. Mining projects inevitably lead to heavy pollution as well as a severe decline of biodiversity within the region. Apart from that, they disrupt local communities up to the point that the original way of living of native populations threatens to be completely destroyed.

However, I might be dropping an unpopular opinion here, but I do believe that the main problem is not the idea of nature as a resource, but the lack of respect for reciprocity. Apart from many other things, nature is a resource, it always has been. Without nature as a resource, humans would never have survived. However, what we have forgotten is that we are a resource as well. We need to invest in nature, as much as we extract from it. But the same is true for humans amongst humans. ‘No man is an island’, Hugh Grant’s character Will Freeman in About a boy says (and for the movie buffs: disagrees with). And that is true as well. No human being can exist without another human being, as much as Will Freeman likes to claim he is Ibiza. Our relationships are reciprocal as well. We are each other’s resources.

‘We act to survive’, Bill Mollison wrote in Permaculture. A Designers’ Manual (p. 3). Within the Rights of Nature debate – or in a wider sense, the debates regarding the fight against climate change and loss of biodiversity – this is perhaps the most essential thing to keep in mind. We should not try to save a planet, at least not for the planet’s sake. The planet constantly changes and adapts, but it will not cease to exist within the near future. Instead, we have to try to save ourselves, the human species.

So, what would be prudent to do in our quest for survival?

Well, if all life systems indeed function within reciprocal relationships, to increase our chances of survival in these growing climate change and biodiversity crises, humans would do well to pay a little more respect to this notion of reciprocity. ‘We depend on good health in all systems for our survival’, according to Bill Mollison (p. 3). In his theory on natural selection, Charles Darwin already taught us that the ability to adapt to changing circumstances enhances the survival changes of species. So, if e.g. our meat consumption has too much of a negative environmental impact, due to land usage, water usage and its high amount of greenhouse gas emissions, we might consider switching to a more plant-based diet, as advised by the IPCC (par. B.6.2). No more escargots for me, that is.

So this is what permaculture ethics is about. It builds a system around the notion of reciprocity. It acknowledges the inextricable relationship between humans themselves and the interdependency between humans and the rest of nature. Not for nature’s sake, but for our sakes. So a bit for me and a bit for the slugs, because we need each other. They’ve already started on my endive, so I assume they agree. What a relief.