For those of us working as consultants and designers in the field of Permaculture it is very important that we assess and understand the local ecosystem and bioregion that we are working in on several scales. Along with the Designer’s Manual, as a basic reference, I constantly return to the work of John Lyle. His books, “Design for Human Ecosystems” and “Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development”, are the clearest and most practical studies of how to approach our work that I have found. And this is on any scale that we are working. How can we approach our work with any depth if we are not thoroughly invested in the local landscape from every possible angle that we can muster: geological, botanical, zoological, historical, etc. When we listen to the land and what it is telling us of its history and where it is at present we are then able to create ecosystems at human scale that are healthy, balanced and yield abundantly. Until we get to this underlying matrix of processes that course through the system, where the exchange of materials and energies is understood in the relationships that we can delineate, we cannot proceed. It is no coincidence that Bill Mollison started his whole discussion with a detailed examination of ecology and how to apply this understanding to our design work. Lyle is a master of simplifying the procedures of the dynamics of ecosystems and how we might go about our business in design practice mirroring the genius of what we uncover.
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