3 anchors

One of my favorite permaculture principles is Planned Redundancy. What does this picture have to do with that? Well, when I took my PDC (permaculture design course) back in 2011 at OAEC, one of my teachers was Brock Doleman. I had just moved from Jackson WY to Northern California. Brock and I bonded immediately since he too had spent many days in the Tetons climbing. So when he spoke of planned redundancy in permaculture, he looked at me and said, “it’s like a 3 point anchor”. When you set an anchor with your own equipment on a face of a rock a couple thousand feet up, you want to reduce the risk of failure! So you set multiple anchor pieces that then connect to you and your party. If one of those anchors blows out, you have 2 left. If 2 fail...well you still got one, which means you’re still alive!! In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. It immediately made sense to me. When planting a crop, spread it out in multiple areas, so if one gets disease or is eaten by animals, you have back up supply. It reduces the risk of utter failure. It strengthens the system. Having 3 anchors weighted down disperses the weight evenly so not to put too much pressure on each point. So in the garden, crops that are spread out are more resilient and less likely to fail because there’s less pressure on them as a whole. More variety allows the plants to evenly share nutrients and not stress out the soil and microorganisms. Anyway. When I think of planned redundancy, I think of Brock and the Tetons, which brings me a giant smile!