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The spider on its web, with its concentric and radial design shows a clear pattern even though the details always vary. This icon evokes zone and sector site planning - the best known and perhaps most widely applied aspect of permaculture design.
Modernity has tended to scramble any systemic common sense or intuition that can order the jumble of design possibilities and options that confront us in all fields. This problem of focus on detail complexity leads to the design of white elephants that are large and impressive but do not work, or juggernauts that consume all our energy and resources while always threatening to run out of control. Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the appropriate pattern for that design is more important than understanding all the details of the elements in the system.
The idea which initiated permaculture was the forest as a model for agriculture. While not new, its lack of application and development across many bioregions and cultures was an opportunity to apply one of the most common ecosystem models to human landuse. Although many critiques and limitations to the forest model need to be acknowledged, it remains a powerful example of pattern thinking which continues to inform permaculture and related concepts, such as forest gardening, agroforestry and analogue forestry.
The use of zones of intensity of use around an activity centre such as a farmhouse to help in the placement of elements and subsystems is an example of working from pattern to details. Similarly environmental factors of sun, wind, flood, and fire can be arranged in sectors around the same focal point. These sectors have both a bioregional and a site specific character which the permaculture designer carries in their head to make sense of a site and help organize appropriate design elements into a workable system.
The use of swales and other earthworks to distribute and direct runoff water must be based on primary land patterns. In turn these earthworks then create moisture productivity zones that define planting and management systems.
While traditional land use systems provide many models of whole system design, people embedded in cultures of place often need experience which allows them to view their landscape and communities in new ways. In some of the pioneering Landcare projects in Australia in the 1980's, aerial over flights of their farms gave landholders both the picture and the motivation to begin serious work to address tree decline and associated land degradation problems. From the air, the patterns of land ownership were less visible, while the catchment patterns of nature stood out. Similarly the larger social and community context, rather than technical factors, can often determine whether a particular solution is a success. The list of overseas development projects that have failed due to ignorance of these larger-scale factors is extensive.
The proverb 'Can't see the wood (forest) for the trees' reminds us that the details tend to distract our awareness of the nature of the system; the closer we get the less we are able to comprehend the larger picture.