Permaculture Principle 3: Obtain a Yield

While Principle 2 (Catch and Store Energy) explained the need to use existing wealth to make long-term investments in our natural capital, Principle 3 reminds us that it is pointless to spend all our time, energy and resources planting a food forest for our grandchildren if we have nothing for ourselves to eat today and tomorrow.

To put it in “systems language”, a yield, profit, or income sets up a “positive feedback loop” that encourages and amplifies the original process. Small business owners are used to putting it this way: “You need positive cash flow as well as profit.” Or, as the proverb David Holmgren chose for this principle says: “You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

The most comfortable yields will come in regular wave patterns, like a paycheck every week or two. Or, to use an example from gardening, you want an abundance of strawberries in the spring, tomatoes in the summer, apples in the fall, and root vegetables in the winter.

We need to keep principles 2 and 3 working in tandem to move through any process well — balance is the key. Applying too much of one without enough of the other will lead to all kinds of intractable structural problems.

In my opinion (for example) the concentrated application or Principle 2 without balancing it with Principle 3 is one of the big problems with our current education system. Without necessarily being able to verbalize it children feel the abstraction, the unreality, the unconnectedness of the way they are expected to learn (and live!) in school. And they do not respect it.

As adults we despise what we perceive to be unconnected or meaningless routine work — and yet we expect our children to love it, to thrive on it.

We expect them to “do education” literally for years with very little present yield to sustain their spirits. It’s as if we want to blow them up like little helium balloons, until finally they are full enough to float off.

To make any useful changes we must understand and change the structural difficulties behind the problems we see on the surface — otherwise we end up maintaining the status quo by “alleviating problems” while allowing their causes to remain the same.