This principle is truly powerful when it is fully used. This is at the core of the game of permaculture. Our society encourages us to segregate everything. We put our children in school with their own age group and separate them out from the rest of society for 12 years. Modern science is made up of micro-specialties that don’t always communicate to other specialities no matter how related. An example of this might be a chemical that does something really useful, but is also highly toxic and will certainly end up in ecosystems if used as intended. If the people inventing this don’t study those effects, how would they know?
Integrate:
1. To combine (one thing) with another so that they become a whole. (b) to combine two or more things in order to become more effective.
"transportation planning should be integrated with energy policy"
2. Bring (people or groups with particular characteristics or needs) into equal participation in or membership of a social group or institution.
mid 17th century: from Latin integrat- ‘ made whole’, from the verb integrare, from integer ‘whole’ (see integer). Compare with integral and integrity.
We are designing a system and the parts do interact. How well they interact is up to the designer. Two key ideas in this principle, stated by David Holmgren and Bill Molison in "Permaculture One", are:
- each element of a system performs many functions
- each function is supported by many elements
A “functional analysis” in permaculture is a simple exercise that matches needs with resources. Take chickens as one example. Naming what they need and what they give should help you determine where you place their coop in relation to other things in the system. Sometimes, you don’t want to integrate elements - chickens in veggie gardens or goats in a young food forest can be very destructive, for instance. The trick is to determine what elements can be beneficial for each other.
In the case of chickens, they love certain types of food including moringa and mulberries. Why not plant some trees around the edges of their coop where some of the fruit can fall straight into the coop? This eliminates some work for you - you can also chop some moringa and drop it straight into the coop.
How close can you store the bedding to the coop? Chickens love dust baths, so how about giving them a space where there is some bare dirt? Or where do you need bare dirt? Because they will clear the land for you, and poop and create a nice fertile bed, if you also throw some leaves or mulch or other bedding in their pen where they can scratch for insects and build beautiful garden beds all while making eggs for you.
This is one example of how to integrate one element - chickens, with many other elements in a way that benefits flow in all directions.
You do have to know something about the nature of each element in your system to understand what it might need, and what kind of resource it can be.
Hands On Activity
Choose an element in your system. An element is any single thing in your system, such as a water catchment tank or a garden bed. Name several ways you could arrange that element to support other things in your system. Name several ways this element could be supported by other things in the system.
Example: Garden bed - could provide food for humans, animals, and wildlife, can build soil, provide pollinators for bees, a place to store water (in the good soil of the bed). The things that could support it would be rain catchment, bees, compost, human care, etc.
How could you combine those elements or place them in a way that would cause both of them to “be more effective?”