#Seed002: Why People Need Soil

A three-part series on designing healthy, resilient, and regenerative communities

May 05, 2023

This is the first publication from our three-part series on designing healthy, resilient, and regenerative communities. In this series, I explore permaculture principles in light of community design and facilitation.

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it, we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”- Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

I’d say that my love for soil began just over a year ago. It was not love at first sight. Actually, I started to wonder why a certain patch in my garden could never seem to grow. I’d seed grass, nothing. I’d seed clover, nothing. After a rainfall, this little patch just puddled while after a few sunny hours it just seemed like gray dust. For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about this patch. Why was it that things just refused to grow?

To be honest, it became somewhat of an obsession. To my wife’s chagrin, I bought a bunch of books on soil science. I had a complete paradigm shift. Soil is composed water, air, minerals (sand, silt, and clay), and life (both living and decaying), containing roughly 40-45% inorganic matter, 5% organic matter, 25% water, and 25% air. In other words, it is a mixture of life, decay, and the lifeless. Looking at my little patch, I started to realize that it was simply lifeless; a blend of sand, silt, and clay.

This is what a lifeless environment looks and feels like. It cannot contain life. You throw a seed on dirt and it will simply dry in the sun. For dirt to become soil, it needs life, water, and air. Then the soil will support growth.

We often hear the metaphor that the oak is contained in the seed. That may be true, but only with healthy soil will the oak actually manifest. If we don’t care for the soil, we cannot care for the oak.

As a community facilitator, I think about this a lot. Communities thrive when the people within it flourish. But what happens when the community is not thriving? What happens when the community’s “soil” is just “dirt?”

Here we have a choice:

Either we inject the dirt with chemical fertilizers, providing just enough lifeforce for one crop, and risking erosion for future generations; or
We take the time needed to regenerate the soil by composting, mulching, growing cover crops, ultimately stewarding the healing process of the earth.

The second option takes time. Only when we overcome our paradigm of a mechanized world to be fixed and improved will we truly apply regenerative principles. Whenever I pick up the Quran, and begin reading the Chapter of the Cow, I am always struck by the immediate injunction:

“And whenever they are told, ‘Work not corruption across the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but putting things right.’” (Quran, 2:12)

Peter Froehlich, one of my theatre professors in University once shared with me the difference between Greek and Roman auditoriums. He explained that the Greeks sought out places that had natural acoustics to perform their plays. On the contrary, the Romans built their theatres. Though Roman engineering was unlike any other of its time, they constantly had to solve problems. Their theatres would create sanitation problems. Their sewers would lead to vermin infestations, etc. To sum it up, they were in a perpetual state of solutioneering.

Isn’t this what happens when we think we are putting things right? Unwittingly, we may be working corruption across the earth, thinking that we are solving major problems. Industrial agriculture “feeds” families. Globalization “lowers” prices. Cars bring us “closer.” These are all solutions to what we think are problems. But have we considered how our solutions corrupt the earth? Perhaps, we too think, “we are but putting things right.”

I’m trying to take an approach in my life to be wary of working corruption across the earth. I’ve applied this in my gardening by using the permaculture design principles developped by David Holmgren:

Observe and interact
Catch and store energy
Obtain a yield
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
Use and value renewable resources and services
Produce no waste
Design from patterns to details
Integrate rather than segregate
Use small and slow solutions
Use and value diversity
Use edges and value the marginal
Creatively use and respond to change

Applying these twelve design principles not only sustain the soil but improve it. What happens if we start seeing our communities not as mechanical systems but as soil? How might we apply these principles to our community? It is my conviction that applying these principles to our community will support human flourishing.

Over the next three weeks, I will be exploring these principles in light of community design and facilitation. I believe that if we start to look at communities as social soils instead of social institutions, we will be able to design healthy, resilient, and regenerative communities.

The Design Principles

This week, I will look at the first four principles and share my notes on how I use them in my community engagement practices. Below you’ll find some notes and sketches based on my observations and work over the years. I hope that they spark something with you so that you may uncover ways to use these principles in your own work.

Observe and Interact

When thinking about these twelve principles, it is easy to conceive them as being linear. That said, it’s important to recognize that good design doesn’t necessarily have one starting point. The process is circular. That said, this principle is usually understood to be the best place to start in your design journey.

When the inspiration for action arrives, we sometimes approach any task with a “get ‘er done” attitude. Permaculture design invites us to resist that impulse and to slow down, observe, and take it in. I’ve noticed that communities tend to have two types of patterns: spoken and unspoken. Spoken patterns are the patterns that members of the community can articulate. These patterns are often the results of consultation. We may hear things like: “We host a potluck every week on Sundays at 1PM” and “our community is mostly composed of young professionals.” These spoken patterns are a useful launch pad but community design needs to tap into the unspoken patterns. By taking the time to observe and interact, we start noticing those patterns.

As a facilitator, I often ask these questions to identify unspoken patterns:

How are people interacting with the physical space around them?
How are people relating to each other?
How do people relate to time? Are they arriving early or late? Are they at ease or antsy?
How are people showing up in community?
How are people leaving community?

These questions are just a starting point. The key point is that observing and interacting with a community will help identify patterns, which are essential to community design.

Catch and store energy

We all know that everything follows the path of least resistance. Anyone who has observed a rainfall will notice where the water runs off, puddles, or is absorbed by the soil. Permaculture design invites us to catch and store water so that in times of drought, that water can be used and our gardens can continue to thrive.

What is energy?

Energy comes from the Greek, enérgeia, meaning activity. Simply put, energy is the ability to do work. In community design, catching and storing energy is extremely important. Energy, in all its forms, ebbs and flows. When energy is flowing, we need to design ways to catch and store it so that we can use its surplus when it ebbs.

Taking a top-down approach to community design, for example, is energy intensive. You could think of this as taking an existing plot of land, ripping all the vegetation out of the ground, bringing in a few tonnes of top soil, replanting, and watering. This process is energy intensive: not only your physical labour is needed but we also need to take into account transporting the soil, as well as the amount of sunlight and water needed.

After you’ve identified the unspoken patterns, you may start to do minor design adjustments to ensure that the energy is captured and stored. In community design, this means creating clear engagement roadmaps for people, providing services for people to remain engaged, and establishing clear expectations. For example, the most successful community initiatives are often consistent small-scale interventions rather than resource-heavy events.

Obtain a yield

This is perhaps the first action-focused design principle. Just like a harvest makes the work worth it, celebrating the efforts of people builds, sustains, and regenerates communities. Any leader will tell you that we need moments to celebrate success. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ told his disciples, “Whoever does not thank people has not thanked God.”

Community yield is about thanksgiving. It is the glue that binds people together. Success and results are not only motivating factors to community engagement but are sustaining ones as well. As community facilitators, our role is to share sucesses. This can be done through storytelling, celebrations, testimonials, and any other way that showcase peoples talents, loves, engagements, commitments, and joys.

As a facilitator, whenever I design community workshops, I plan two components:

An intentional “downtime” where people can share food, stories, and laughter; and
A moment to celebrate a person, a milestone, or a success regardless of its scale.

The purpose of these is simply to obtain a yield. It is a community takeaway that helps cultivate gratitude for the place we call home.

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This is perhaps the most neglected part of community development. Communities are not start-ups. Start-ups are mission-oriented and tend to be led by passionate people who want to achieve their goal. When communities take on this approach, they cannot apply self-regulation and accept feedback.

I’ve observed that the most resilient communities are those that have natural feedback mechanisms to convene, consult, and listen. I am not talking about organizations that host town halls or general meetings, but communities that encourage participation. Through participation, in design and implementation, self-regulation is naturally applied (people are more civil when they are face-to-face).

As a community designer and facilitator, applying self-regulation and accepting feedback also allows you to challenge prejudice (prae, in advance + judicium, judgement), that is making decisions before having the full picture. Taking that step back, and accepting feedback, provides that clearer picture and not only supports particular design decisions but also encourages community buy-in, without which a community will become fragmented.

The aforementioned design principles are an excellent starting point for community designers and facilitators to adopt a permaculture mindset. Permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. In community design, it is essential to consider not only those who are present but also both its past and future members. In his contemplation on the role of past members in community, G. K. Chesteron spoke about the democracy of the dead in his book, Orthodoxy. He writes,

“Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. […] Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

And inviting unborn generations into our communities, T.S. Eliot pens,

“Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.”

This is my attempt on designing permanent cultures. In my next publication, I will go over the following design principles and reflect on how communities can thrive by adopting them:

Use and value renewable resources and services
Produce no waste
Design from patterns to details
Integrate rather than segregate