The Three Ethics

Every permaculture course lists three ethics. Almost none of them makes you do anything about the third one. Earth care and people care are easy to nod along to. Fair share is the one that costs you money, land, or a purchase you wanted to make, which is why it gets recited and then quietly dropped.

You should be able to state all three and then say, out loud, what the third one forbids in your own household this year.

The three, stated properly

Mollison's formulation in the Designers' Manual is: care of the earth, care of people, and setting limits to population and consumption, which is usually shortened to fair share. The order is not decoration.

Care of the earth comes first because nothing else is possible without it. Soil, water, and the living systems that make food are the ground the other two stand on.

Care of people comes second because a household that is starving cannot care for land. This is where permaculture parts company with the ascetic reading of ecology. The point is a household that eats well and stays free, not a household that suffers for its principles.

Fair share is the cap. It has two parts, and both are demands. Set limits to consumption: take what you need and no more, and know the number. Return the surplus: what you do not need goes back into the soil, the community, or the next household's store, and it does not go into expansion for its own sake.

What fair share asks of a household

A cap you cannot measure is not a cap. Fair share becomes real when you can write three numbers on the kitchen wall: how much you eat, how much land it takes, and what you gave away last year.

The measured model here is Alik Pelman's farm in the western Galilee. Since May 2013 he has produced a complete adult diet on 740 square metres of cultivated ground, about 0.183 of an acre, with roughly 96 hours of labour a year. Eighty percent of the calories are rainfed staples: wheat, fava beans, and olives. The vegetable garden is 140 square metres, about forty varieties on a nine-year rotation, and it is the only irrigated ground, using about 50 cubic metres of water a year. He reckons a plant-based diet of wheat, beans, and oil costs about two percent of income, and he says growing wheat does not save money, because wheat sells at about fifty cents a kilogram. What the wheat buys is not savings. It is a household that cannot be blackmailed by a supply chain.

Turn that into a cap and it lands at about one acre per 5.5 people, or 1.5 acres for eight. Applied to one West Virginia county, Wetzel, the whole population of 13,766 could be fed on 2,517 cultivated acres, which is 1.1 percent of the county. The land was never the constraint. The constraint is what the land is doing, who holds it, and who knows the system.

Fair share is a cap on the other end too. Cato's farm-management book states the rule in one line, and it is the shortest statement of the ethic on record: the good farmer's appetite is to sell, not to buy. The Capitulare de villis makes the same point as policy, requiring the estate storeroom to hold its own tools and vessels "so that there is no need to seek them elsewhere or to borrow them." Ostrom's work on the commons adds the governance half: successful commons have clear boundaries, rules made by the people affected, monitoring, and graduated sanctions against the member who takes more than their share. Sufficiency research points the same way, with modelled transition scenarios finding forty to sixty percent demand reduction against conventional paths.

The other side of the ethic

Fair share has a failure mode in both directions. Chayanov's study of the peasant household found that the household produces for its own consumption, not profit, and that the balance between family need and the drudgery of labour sets how hard it works. Push that balance too far and the ethic becomes self-exploitation: a family that never stops because "enough" was never defined. The cap cuts both ways. It limits what you take from the land and from each other, and it also entitles the household to stop.

At the other end, fair share that is only preached is just another slogan, and the people who preach it hardest are not usually the ones taking less.