nocropped 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 permaculture system within that perimeter – as suggested by Mollison.
Finally here, to link this principle to content from Chapter 5: the ‘unnamed movement’ written about by Hawken in Blessed Unrest is constituted by millions of small organisations that slowly have for decades been challenging oppressive Promethean endeavours. Hawken (2007: 141-142) likened these organisations as parts of an interconnected immune system: “the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation”. Considering that permaculture is a universal but adaptable and context-bound approach that works to affect small and slow systemic solutions that strengthen and spread over time, it plays an important role as a systemic platform from which the kind of Orphic endeavours spoken about by Hawken can take place.
 https://www.permaculture.org.uk/principle/9-use-small-and-slow-solutions accessed 24 February 2016
 What is meant by ‘universal, adaptable and context-bound’ is that it can be practiced anywhere, but every manifestation of a permaculture system will be different depending on the unique ‘contextual’ factors of an area, factors such as climate, slope of land, main purpose for which the system will be put to use, specific conservation concerns, budgets, etc.