Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

Everybody knows the permaculture strategy of closely observing a site for a year before
beginning the design process. Robyn Francis demonstrates this with the immense value of
working as an international permaculture teacher for 40 years before writing a knowledgeable
synopsis of integrated design. It’s all here: the proper attitude and mindset, the diverse
array of considerations, the strategy for putting it all together. Most importantly, Robyn
introduces her Eco-Social Matrix methodology, a tool for integrating natural, social, and
services catchments into a comprehensive design. While the Eco-Social Matrix can be applied
at any scale, it is especially useful for evaluating the catchments of a village scale community.
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Macro to Micro:
Introducing EcoSocial Matrix as a
Tool for Integrated Design
Overview
Robyn Francis – Djanbung Gardens, Nimbin, Australia
I’ve always striven to achieve what I term an wholistic lifestyle, living in an
environment that seamlessly integrates all aspects of my life: social, work,
living, personal, community, creative, spiritual, productive and so on. I have
consciously used the original English word, ‘wholistic’, spelt with a ‘w’,
rather than the American-influenced spelling, ‘holistic’. Wholistic is derived
from ‘whole’, a state of completion, all encompassing, whereas a ‘hole’ to
my mind infers something still missing, an emptiness waiting to be filled.
In my travels and work with traditional and indigenous societies over
four decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the boundaries between work
and play, material and spiritual, function and productivity, individual and
community are blurred – how they integrate seamlessly into everyday life.
Our contemporary society is quite fractured or dis-integrated in comparison,
to the extent that many of these aspects of life are perceived as almost
irreconcilable opposites. Through over-specialisation we have separated out
and effectively ‘mono-cultured’ most aspects of society and living, not just
our agriculture and land-use systems.
What is integrated design? What are we bringing together? What factors
are we integrating? Permaculture Design inherently seeks to develop integrated
systems, which can be overwhelming for the beginner as the array of factors
and elements to consider very quickly build into a rather complex web of
relationships. We can integrate on many different levels, from micro to macro,
from details in the design and management through to the bigger picture context.