Something that has always set Permaculture apart from me is its rootedness in three ethics.

Permaculture isn’t just a bunch of interesting design principles and useful techniques. It’s definitely not swales, or agroforestry, or hugulkultur beds – even if I love all those things.

Permaculture is an art that includes three ethics that Permaculture designers are called to live by any time they’re participating in this work: care for earth, care for people, and share the surplus.

We’re not meant to only apply these things when they’re convenient. As we answer the challenge of living them, we apply them to every choice we make in our interactions with land and each other.

One of the places I’ve applied these ethics may seem a bit unusual. On the surface, it doesn’t have much to do with building soil, growing healthy food, or anything else we usually envision when we think about Permaculture.

It’s around human attention and how I promote the work I do.

Marketing and the sacredness of human attention

Silver Branch Permaculture is mostly tended by one person (though I never forget that it rests on the support of my family, my friends, the plants, my teachers, and everyone who chooses to pay me to help them learn this). It’s a very small business and the main income source for my family.

When I offer design consultations or workshops, I know that their success directly connects to our survival. And so of course, it can be tempting to use every method available to make sure that as many people sign up or hire me as possible.

There are marketing tactics that can effectively pressure people into doing something or buying something. There’s a reason I don’t use them, and it’s not that I don’t know how.

Because of my strange background which included a time leading a digital marketing team at a non-profit, I am all too aware of the specific ways that marketers try to grab your attention.

When my workplace asked me to attend marketing conferences, I walked out of them sick to my stomach. I’ve cringed through corporate presentations by Youtube and Twitter, talking about our emotions and our connections to our families as if they were weaknesses we have that marketers could capitalize on.

I’ve seen how many marketers talk about us. We’re treated as objects. Our unworthiness, our anxieties, our FOMO are targets. There are stories I could tell.

What does this have to do with Permaculture?

One of the best Permaculture teachers I’ve learned from asked us to answer what was the most important thing humans could contribute to ecosystems. There were a lot of good answers, but they weren’t what he was looking for. I raised my hand and answered correctly that it was attention.

The sacred quality of human attention is the greatest help we can give to ecosystems. It’s the main “tool” of Permaculture design. Without it, we are destined to be at odds with the realms of plants, animals, fungi, soil, and water. Attention is how we tune in to ways that may be different than the ones we’ve been taught.

But there’s another dimension to it that can be harder to understand for those of us raised in a civilization that mostly sees the earth as dead matter. Our attention is a gift we can share. Our attention can be as nourishing as rain.

Places that have received loving human attention for a long time feel different than those that have been treated only as resources to develop. It’s not only in what we can measure. There is a sacred quality to it that all earth-intimate cultures understood. Anyone who speaks to their garden or houseplants gets it. Life responds to presence.

We can learn to focus our attention. Even then, it can only be with one experience at a time. Aggressive marketing clouds our attention like sediment running into a river. It threatens to exhaust our capacity to be. We can and ought to reclaim it – and, it would help all of us if there was less digital noise to have to take it back from.

Taking care of our attention like a river or the soil

If I want land and people to thrive, then I want to respect the ability for humans to give their attention.

In this time, that respect is given far too rarely.

I have experienced more than one Permaculture-related business that seems to be willing to do anything to grab for my attention.

It’s not just the daily emails. It’s the messages used to get me to do something that I may not want to do.

In this example above, the part that bugs me the most (besides the 1-2 emails per day frequency) is this message of: “There are two kinds of people in moments like this.”

First off: there are never two kinds of people except that we say there are. Human variety is infinite.

I know as someone with a background in this work that this message is made to make me feel unsure of myself, subtly, but strongly.

It’s meant to make me doubt the slow decision I should be able to make around whether or not to commit thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of my time to learning something.

The daily emails, sometimes inspiring, sometimes vaguely shaming, sometimes promising the heavens and earth and inifinite love if I only do what they say, are meant to wear me down. This specific course’s promotions, to me, has a way of implying that the only thing standing between it and the well being of the earth is my choice of whether or not to pay for what they’re selling.

Instead of applying the kind of slow decision making that would help me arrive at a good choice, the “two kinds” message is meant to make me wonder which “kind of people” I am, with the subtle implication that one kind of people is good, and the other… a loser? Someone who doesn’t care about the future? Someone who should feel bad for not having $3000+ to spend on an online course right now?

What happens to someone who signs up for a course like this under immense pressure? Maybe I had been rightly thinking that I didn’t have the time or money for this, or that it wasn’t a great fit for me, but under all that promise and coercion, I gave in. If that’s what gets me to it, what kind of student will I be?

Will I really apply what I learn, or, when the pressure and guilt and fear of missing out wear off, will I be left with a whole lot of expensive videos to watch that I’m not sure if I really wanted?

Applying the ethics to ourselves

I’m not trying to single anyone out. I know the challenge of surviving in these crazy end of empire times.

And – I’m calling on people who practice regeneration of land and water, and those who practice care for human health to help me in finding ways to exist without trying to milk the attention of other humans to the same way we’ve exhausted so many other sacred gifts of this planet.

Caring for people and caring for the earth both involve respecting human attention. People and the land are both less well when our attention is drowning in a sea of digital noise.

Like all things Permaculture, it’s easier if more of us do it. If I’m the only person respecting your inbox, then the louder voices might cover mine up; and, I know that if everyone is shouting, no one is really heard.

For me, as a small business person trying to survive, this means I only send occasional emails – rarely ever more than one a week, and usually one a month. I want to be found in search engines if someone is looking for Permaculture locally. I put up flyers. I count on word-of-mouth from people I’ve helped. I have occasional Youtube videos. If anything I’m doing on the internet is keeping you from being present in the real world, I want to know it so I can change it.

If you’re curious to hear more about how this connects to Permaculture, here’s a Youtube video (hosted on a corporate platform that thinks of your family as a marketing opportunity) that you can watch and share with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting me in trying to walk this way that I believe in.

And thank you for anything you do to protect and care for your attention, so that it may be taken back from the corporations that desperately try to claim it, and given back to life.