ciency will be attained, which is a solution (albeit one that comes about slowly) to the problem of settlements where each household has water and energy piped in, sewage and grey water piped out, and no local sources of sustenance – all of which comes at immense ecological expense as seen in Chapters 1 and 2. It must also be mentioned here that this small and slow approach to implementing solutions to ecological problems can be applied not only in the individualistic context of ‘the average person’, but the average neighbourhood, city, region, and country – the methodology remains much the same.
A brief comment must also be made here in support of small and slow solutions characteristic of permaculture endeavours, as opposed to large and fast approaches common in ACID. If a proposed ‘solution’ turns out to be inappropriate for a specific context, then due to it being small and slow it would not have caused too much damage in an existing system. An example of this in permaculture is introducing a plant that at first grows quickly and provides shade in an overly sunny area, which may seem like an asset in a hot and dry climate. But later the plant may prove to be invasive, to reduce the growth rate of other plants, and to starve other plants of water – this is not a beneficial relationship between plant species and should be avoided in a permaculture system. Having slowly introduced a small number of such an invasive plant into the system, it is relatively easy to eliminate it from the system, allowing for different shade-providing plants to be incorporated instead; nothing much would have been lost in this endeavour. On the other, large and fast ‘solutions’ in ACID – for example, a massive fish farm in the bay of a city – appear at massive financial and energy costs, so there is incentive to keep them running even when massive ecological problems occur, in this instance problems like an increase in shark attacks at local beaches, as well as algae issues from the unnaturally high levels of fish-food substances (monocropped grains) and fish manure concentrated to the fish farm area.
The researcher and his partner did not initially take heed of this principle, and suffered greatly for their rash action. They had perceived a two-fold problem, first in their own lives when they worked ‘thankless’ full-time jobs that required increasing amounts of time and energy, leaving little of either for anything else, and second in the broader context where their lifestyles were totally reliant on ACID’s systems and therefore ‘by default’ perpetuated practices that cause massive ecological harm. The researcher and his partner chose to quit their jobs and instead move onto an empty piece of a friend’s land. Not having a roof over-head, no kitchen, no toilet facilities, etc. (really nothing – they lived in a camping-tent to begin with), they had to quickly construct a functional living environment from scratch, which was very stressful and resulted in decisions being made too quickly. The garden areas were also made too big, and even at the time of typing (three and a half years after moving to the land) there are garden beds that cannot be tended because two people can only ‘do so much’. They would have been far better off had they acquired a small cabin immediately upon arriving at the land, and finalised all aspects of their homestead before getting too carried away with big food gardens etc. The small and slow approach would have allowed the researcher and his partner to take heed of other important principles, as has already been discussed in this sub-section as being the case when a small and slow approach is taken. The researcher and his partner, as mentioned already in this chapter, have become custodians of their own acre of land, and they are slowly considering what the best course of action is for the land; at the time of writing, a small cabin has been partially constructed and it will soon be placed on the acre, with the intention being to create a small perimeter around the cabin to begin with, and then to develop the permacu