Permaculture Homesteads

Permaculture is the most established ecological design framework. It's not a harmonode itself, but a methodology for designing harmonodes.

It's most often applied at the homestead level. Occassionally1 it's applied so thoroughly to the whole of building/infrastructure and landscape to attain the synergies that'd sufficiently qualify it as a harmonode.

Synergy:

  • symbiotic plant guilds, companion planting
  • plant-animal symbiosis: ducks eating snails (as in "pest control") in the garden
  • symbiotic animal coupling: chickens grooming sheep preventing fly infestation
  • getting all of your home's heat and hot water just by cooking food in your wood-fired kitchen stove

Limitation

The most significant drawback worth looking at here is scope and scale.

Humans need a loved family of neighbors in order to thrive — loved community in a way that almost none of us have ever experienced.

We need elements, experiences, freedoms, and such, that only the synergies of community provide.

We need to be designing systems of care — health/child/hospice/etc — into our homes and neighborhoods, and the individual homestead scope/scale fails to meet these needs, and thus makes the harmonode less-performant in meeting human needs.

Notes:

  1. Achieving a homestead facility that can be legitimately called a harmonodes is quite rare. Usually permaculture is applied lightly and not thoroughly, and achieving a harmonode requires the building and infrastructure (and not just the "landscaping") to be ecologically optimized.

What harmonodes can look like:

Envisioning: