Observation, Growth, and Change through the Permaculture Lens

Hi, I'm Tyler. I’m a father, husband, permaculture designer, nutrition specialist, herbalist, teacher, homesteader, folk songwriter, citizen scientist, homeschool dad, and among some other things, the owner and operator of Ancient Origins. I hold an integrative medicine degree and that is where I first learned about permaculture what seems like a different life ago. There has been so much growth, observation, and change in my life since deciding I would leave healthcare to homeschool my son, to dive more into homesteading, and start a permaculture design business. Honestly, I call it a mission rather than a business. I'll explain why later. I want to get into a bit of permaculture principle for a second. Bill Mollison draws upon observation with the principle that Everything Gardens, and David Holmgren’s first principle is Observe and Interact.

When we interact, it should be with relationships in mind. We want to be able to self-regulate, mitigating our impact, while improving systems from patterns noticed to detailed actualization.

Interaction in permaculture should lead to the smallest changes for the greatest good. David said, "Good design depends on a free and harmonious relationship between nature and people, in which careful observation and thoughtful interaction provide the design inspiration."

I’ll tell you a bit more about our story. Where do I start. I was working as a nutrition specialist for a nonprofit and focusing on the nutrition challenges of the underserved in cities when I realized just how many barriers there were to human health within our current system. Each day, I tried my best to share my lifestyle, medical knowledge, and empathy, but too often it was a futile effort. Then, one day I was catching a wave when the awesome power of nature broke my body. I was given months to sit with my broken bones, one of which was the t4 vertebrae. I had a lung collapse, seperated ribs, and several tears and fractures. Just all this nasty damage from one wave that I should have never played with. 

The moral of that story is that surfing during a storm is no good, but cheating death changed me. I began realizing I couldn't really use the current systems to make the changes required for my family and truly, or to be an example for the whole of the society. I wanted to be present, intentional, to make it count, to heal, and to regenerate. 

One day during my recovery. I was in the shower thinking about the struggles of our time. I was thinking how much resistance it would take to pull back the levers of control degrading people and planet exponentially more each day. Frantically, and then more frantically I sped up my washing and rushed to dry off... So much to do. Here's where permaculture healed me and changed my purpose. This time for observation really changed me.

I knew a little about agriculture, I grew up on a hay farm, and I knew a little about permaculture, but at the time, I did not take a deep enough dive. So I decided to use the downtime with my broken body to learn. I took PDCs, and became obsessed with a permaculture life. I insisted we moved back away from the city to a home with some land where I could show folks how football fields of wasteful lawns can be turned into Polyculture guilds that serve so many more functions. I built a website, started blogging, started sharing what permaculture has done in my life, not just on the land, but for my personal health. 

All of the sudden, I found myself becoming a regenerative entrepreneur of sorts. I was turning row homes in the city into homesteads. I was building forest gardens in fancy suburbs. I was designing for forever preserved farms, giving of myself, changing the lives of families, and inspiring personal health changes in a very real way that the Healthcare model would not allow us to achieve. 

I call it a mission, because I decided to work on a sliding pay scale from the start. A permaculture life should be accessible to the single mother, to the factory worker with 5 kids, to the millionaire you think has it made, to everyone. I believe we ought to use our leverage in life to help others. Do I want to earn meaningful income? Sure, that is the way this world goes round. It isn't money I have such disdain for, it is those who pull the levers of oppression. I am not homeless, I am not starving. I choose to give. I choose to not utilize grant funding. I choose to keep the government out of my work for the most part. I like when humans help one another on a personal level. I'm not saying that is a necessary step for everyone, but as for me, I believe we should help one another because we want to. I believe our power to observe, change, and regenerate comes from an authentic intention within community, within a family, a village, a friend, a neighbor, and so on.

Out of setting intentions, my mother bought me a new pick when I was starting our permaculture design business. That pick is as invasive as I ever get with the soil. We make the smallest changes that can serve the most functions. There's no need for huge equipment, compacting the earth and killing the life within that little layer of crust which we owe everything to. 

We need a measurable and observable approach. The smallest changes for the greatest good. We need to opt out of the current agricultural model, educate, and change course. It is time to regenerate our earth. When we take time to observe and interact, we begin to see things differently. If we are willing to view from nature's diverse lens, she almost always lead us to where problems all but turn solutions themselves into solutions that stack functions. We really just have to learn and adapt. A permaculture life is a heck of a lot of fun, but it's also serious work that our planet desperately needs. 

As you probably know, healthy soil is made of carbon chains. This means healthy plants and trees sequester carbon. They also feed real people real food with real nutrition. When will we open our minds? How much until we've seen and had enough? How long until we embrace nature and eachother again. Will it be too late?

The soil and you and I are one in the same. One might even say, we were molded from the clay. Soil is the story of humanity. Unfortunately, it's not a fairy tale.

Everything we are given comes from a reliance upon that tiny layer of organic matter we so often take for granted. The soil and our blood both have an optimal pH of 7. We really are connected.

"Welcome to approaching life with awareness", I heard my mentor Matt Powers once say. 

Design Principle number one; observe and interact. Be in the moment of your life. Be in the moment with nature. Nature is the most diverse designer. Our reductionist science is no match. Our vast corporate business models are no match. Nature has more reasons and methods than we can imagine. Nature is always proving itself more interwoven and intricate than we previously thought, and something tells me that this will always be the case. 

Nature knows that real health, and the foundations of life flow through codependency in the soil, but we do not share with the land or one another. We can heal the planet, the farms, the soil, and ourselves at once, it only takes an understanding of the power of connectedness. 

Biodiversity is thriving in healthy soils. We observe this, and still we try to apply reductionist methods. If we want to boil it down to one thing,the word would be diversity. Diversity of plants, animals, insects, fungi, and microbes... that is the software which runs our planet. 

Rain itself is produced mainly from inland vegetation across the globe. It makes sense we see droughts when we have created bare ground all over vast portions of America and other continents. We want to rid the soil of all but our preference. We want to till it and manipulate it. Thankfully, our planet is regenerative and resilient. We blame climate change on one thing. Again, reductionist thinking. Bare soil, vast city scapes, and the like produce more heat and less rain. 

Even in organic agriculture, tillage destroys the soil life. On a whole scale level, modern agriculture is losing about an inch of soil per year. It takes mother earth hundreds of thousands of years to produce this soil through natural processes. The good news is, even on a global scale, we can replace it in decades.

Synthetic fertilizers and routine tillage degrade the soil, ultimately destroying the microbial life within. Oddly enough, synthetic foods are tied to the destruction of our gut microbiome as well. 

So how can we think about soil differently? The good news is, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, and we can greatly increase the volume of organic matter pretty quickly just by understanding how plant root exudates are consumed by microorganisms. Then those metabolites are converted into waste and given back to the soil. There's a mutually beneficial relationship between the health of the plants, the health of the soil, the health of the life in the soil, and our own health. This balance equates to healthier and more nutrient dense yields. Healthier and more nutrient dense humans, haha. 

The rhizophagy cycle is a process that allows plants to obtain nutrients from microbes in the soil. Microbial extraction is the first step. This occurs where microbes, such as bacteria and fungi, grow in the soil and then enter the root cells of a plant via the microbes and fungi already in the end of rhizome (the tip of the root hair). Once inside, the microbes lose their cell walls and become trapped in the plant cells.

The plant produces reactive oxygen, which breaks down some of the microbes and extracts nutrients from them.

Some of the microbes survive and then reform their cell walls. They leave the root hairs at the growing tip. They then reenter the soil, where they acquire nutrients and repeat the cycle. Clearly the foundation of human health relies heavily on this one process. It is that important!

We need copper, but we can't eat a penny. So the plant needs to take that nutrient up for us first. Plants can also take up toxic things we do not want in our bodies, so think about that the next time someone you may know wants to inject or spray the soil with herbicides, pesticides, etc. 

Healthier plants also produce phytochemicals that repel pests. These relationships are much more highly evolved than we might have ever thought. Again, expressing this truly interconnected process, many of these phytochemicals also fight inflammation in our own body. Nature's health plan for our body, the soil, and the plants and animals is not dissimilar. We really are all connected.

Using these concepts, permaculture and regenerative agriculture are the solution in your backyard as well as in the larger agricultural economy. We integrate animals, disturb minimally, rotate diverse crops, design with the ecology and contour in mind, and we don't leave the soil bare (instead we plant the rain). 

Long term, there are so many benefits to bringing this lifestyle to the land. Soil has a design by nature. Think of the Prairie. Think of the forest. Proper soil requires less fertilizer, less fossil fuel use, sequesters more carbon, holds more water in the soil, and produces higher yields of healthier food. Permaculture and regenerative practices have shown in data to increase nutrients in crops by a third. If you needed any other reason, the farmer's practices, and your practices on your homestead or in your garden, ultimately end up on your plate, and they greatly affect human health. Food is medicine!

Break the cycle, grow a food forest, learn to compost, learn to build diverse Polycultures of plant life, look under the microscope, learn to work with instead of against local ecology. Look at the whole picture. Even on our own land, we can break free from the destruction of reductionist thinking by ditching the lawns, and ditching the monoculture crops in our gardens. Life is a community. 

I have sincerely been so blessed to educate, actualize, and live regeneratively that I can no longer imagine any other way. I had a mentor who often would say the words BE, DO, and HAVE. If we want to have a better world, then we must be and do. If there is a goal you want to reach, you must be the person required, and do what is required. Nature has its own laws, and we must observe so we can be and do what is required to aid regeneration.

Clean air - It’s up to us!
Clean water - up to us!
Regenerative healthy soil - up to us!
Diverse ecosystems - up to us!
Healthy bodies and minds - up to us!
No more food scarcity - It’s up to us!
Healthy, diverse, regenerative relationships and communities - It's up to us!

Today is the day to start respecting the soil, and to respect one another enough to take personal responsibility. Today is the day to start your permaculture journey and share it with all who will listen. 

Permaculture has solutions! Once this knowledge is broken down simply, micro tasks turn themselves into completion of the big picture. Solving so many of our problems begins through observation and change right in our own backyard. 
What a wonderful world it would be. 

If I can learn conscious design and actualize these changes for families and communities, you can too. All it requires is a willingness to observe, to learn, to be, and to do. Actualizing change for the greater good is the best thing you can do with a human life. I imagine a billion folks living a permaculture life rather than vast corporations leading us off a cliff.  

Every day, I strive to convince others to adopt a permaculture life, and to be the change on their own land, on their churches land, in their community garden, in the forests around them, in their daily lives, to let permaculture become who they are. 

It's a regenerative life if I have ever seen one. I've shared here many photos of projects that I would say we were able to actualize to a point of completion from most of what the design would require to begin incorporating a closed loop cycle in stride with mother nature rather than holding her back or working directly against.

The growth that happens on each permaculture project is remarkable, and it isn't just happening to the land. Permaculture is people care. I have never had someone say that permaculture did not make them a better person. We can come together from all walks of life to embrace the actualizing of change for the better. If I can be honest, I have just wanted to make a difference from the start. We work on a sliding pay scale in order to make permaculture accessible. 

I used to work as a certified nutrition specialist getting burned out in Healthcare before the pandemic came along. I decided to leave Healthcare to homeschool and risk diving into a homesteading/permaculture life, but what happened was pretty miraculous... A little business where we can use permaculture principles to heal the land, the hearts, the minds, and the bodies of people from all walks of life.

I believe permaculture is the truest science I've ever seen. This is the path forward, and my little business exists to show folks that it really can be done. 

The focus of my writing is on growth, observation, and change. I'll try to speak on how that should relate to all our journeys really, because as with anything for humanity as well as our earth... growth, observation, and change are so interwoven. One doesn't really happen without the other. The cycles we rely on don't happen. We humans aren't the only ones who grow, observe, and change... We don't do it often enough. We aren't sustainable or regenerative right now as a race, and it may be because of that in my observation. 

When we do those things intentionally for the right reasons, that is when the magic happens. That is how we defeat robber barons degrading soil and soul. Hopefully that makes sense. Like the rhizophagy cycle and how intensely it correlates to our own health.

We are all reliant and dependent on these resources that keep all of life flourishing. We know that we have damaged and degraded. We need to observe how things are going, take notice of what affects we have on others, on the oceans, on the soil, and on human health alike. We need to be willing to adapt with and change to fit the truths we cannot escape. That's why permaculture has principles. They are unobjectionable truths as we know it currently. One day, those who embark into deeper frontiers, folks like yourself, they point us to a new truth through real and honest science. Then, if all goes as it should, we say thank you, accept, embrace, and adapt to that new knowledge.

The great news is, folks, that we can team up with our non-human cousins and make these changes for the better quite quickly. All it takes is a willingness. I've been willing to work hand in hand with families. To mentor community members as we design, plan, build, and actualize change together. 

To keep searching, observing, learning, and changing. It is not always easy. We live in strange times. As much as we have faltered, as much as we cannot change the past or change anyone else, we can equally do the work within ourselves, with one another, within the soil, and on our journey in advancing all facets of this regenerative life. 

I've been both humbled and honored to share this journey with so many other amazing regenerative leaders and actualizers. Don’t hesitate to reach out for your next project, or even just for some advice. We are here for the right reasons, happy to lead with integrity, research, education, implementation, and above all, respect for creation.

Peace, Love, and Permaculture,
Tyler Heitzman - Ancient Origins Permaculture