Technology in permaculture

I wanted to create this thread to address the usefulness or lack thereof in smartphone apps and the like, and I'm specifically addressing it as appropriate technology. I have no idea what Fritz Schumacher would think of this power (for good or evil) we hold in our hands or choose not to.

But it is a lot of power. Let this thread be a home for such discussions. Let's lay out the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly, and as the thread ages, new developments and specifically how they might help permaculturalists.

I'll start off with phone apps for plant identification.

Jim

Plant identification. Very earthy. Very useful. Sometimes...very wrong. But these apps are getting stronger and more accurate, and I think they will continue to do so as that dreaded machine learning is applied to such "edge cases" as flowering plants without flowers, young plants, distressed and diseased plants, and the like. I won't debate, and I hope you won't debate, the ethical and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. That isn't why I created this thread. Just take it as a given. It exists. APPs are getting plugged into it.

I've been using Picture This app to identify plants everywhere I go. Sometimes I conduct experiments, taking several pictures from different angles. And sometimes I get two or three different answers.

I recently downloaded iNaturalist, and so far I like it. It gives a probability percentage, telling me basically "I'm 79 percent sure that this is white flower leafcup." It will then give me four or five other probable candidates.

So right off the bat, it begins a discussion about what it could be. Not saying, "this is what it is" like Picture This.

There's another app that I haven't tried yet, called Pl@ntNet. Does anyone have intel on that one?

The bottom line for me on such apps is that it is increasing my biophilia. It is making me smarter about the plants and trees around me, so that I can walk past something green and blurt out, "Well, hello Mrs. Northern Catalpa! How are you today?" And I'll never forget what the bark and leaves of catalpa look like.

Jim

Plant ID apps are genuinely useful now, way better than they were a few years ago. I've also found garden planning and tracking apps worth the friction, ended up building one myself (leaftide.com) because I kept losing track of what I'd pruned and when across a mix of fruit trees and perennials. The phone is just always there, which beats a notebook that ends up in a drawer.

I’ve found that taking the phone outdoors (in a pocket, at least) is a good way to lose it…sometimes for months on end. (Or forever.) Nevertheless, I find a special pleasure in using a dichotomous key that few others share. There isn’t the immediate knowing, there is space, the same sort of space that happens when you’re going along a well-worn path without having to pay close attention to your steps or immediate surroundings—the feeling of expansiveness that no technology can fulfill or fully replace. The only thing that comes close is Google Earth, but even then the simpler the better. I think that imagination is a thing that only happens in the absence of things crowding our attention and more and more have tried to lean into that.

I’ve learnt a lot from the internet—a lot. But now and then I question whether I actually gain any benefit from technology, or whether the ideas I learned and such simply clashed and when the dust settled the picture was the same as if I had never read a single written word in my life. Words hover around a particular reality and without the reality, they begin to vanish.

There is the benefit of reaffirming things you already know to be true. Not “know” as in think but the deeper knowing of having seen for oneself. Part of this reaffirming has had to do with finding community, such as Permies, where I can feel fine being what the average person considers boring or insane.
The writings of Masanobu Fukuoka feel this kind of true to me, and I learned about, and read them, online. They seemed to give me strength. Braiding Sweetgrass is another one of these books but it was lent to me by my neighbor, who told me about it first and permanently expanded my mind and changed my life for the better, which is something I think it does to anyone who reads it in an open frame of mind. It seems like it could just as easily give bad ideas that delude us as good ideas that affirm the truth, like social media beauty standards, hoaxes, political dramas and other content designed to rile us up and destroy our clear seeing. Good or bad, ideas flow more freely.

Hi @ll,

This may be a little controversial, and I only want to share an opinion, but I think everyone’s choices are valid: from those who do not want to use any technology at all, to those who watch series on a tablet after storing solar energy during the day. The problem is not the technology, nor the option each person chooses, but the way of life each of us decides to lead. If there is any space for freedom, it is ours — a space where I believe many of us have chosen ways of living that are very different from what society normally hands us by default.

In my case, I am an electronics engineer, and one part of permaculture leads me to use technology in favour of nature: to make work easier and to make this world a little better. That does not mean technology at any cost. Quite the opposite: it means using technology responsibly. For example, the son of a friend once asked her: “Mum, do you know how much water AI consumes just to tell you what plant is in a photo?”

Yes, that is one way of looking at it. Another way is to think that it is better to use AI to identify plants, detect risks, or explore useful ideas than to use it for any number of pointless things it is often used for. Besides, we are already using the internet — right now, by reading this message — and that also consumes energy. Anyway, as I said, this is a controversial subject, so I respect the reasoning behind everyone’s point of view.

In the project I am working on, technology is part of permaculture. I want to monitor the temperature, humidity, activity, and weight of beehives. I want to build automated machines that do mulching using only solar energy. I want to manage irrigation with a network of valves and IoT sensors over a LoRa network, all powered by small panels. At least I try to see technology as a support tool and to use natural energy sources. The real issue is coherence. If we use a solar panel, how was it manufactured? Does any industrial process fully respect the environment? We can certainly do without all technology. No doubt about that. But when we need to have a CT scan because of a lump somewhere in the body, we will be grateful that someone created, manufactured, and uses that machine that can help save lives.

I will leave it there, because this is a huge debate starting from the small question of which app or apps we can use in our field. For me, all of them can be useful — at least if we approach them as tools to make daily life easier, without letting them create real dependency in order to get things done.

I use my phone to identify plants and insects, and even to study what type of soil I have based on the plants I find on a given piece of land. I also use it to check legal regulations so I can do things properly, and sometimes even to research what layers of trees I could plant on a slope to create a barrier against erosion in the specific area where I am working.

Everything is useful when it helps. Useless when it only consumes time.

If I could add some specificity here, I'd say there's something critically important about using technology intentionally vs. taking it for granted (which usually ends up as being totally unquestioningly reliant on it).

In fact I am developing a theory which states that intentionality is key to what distinguishes "technology" from "nature" in the first place.

What I like about this theory is it also helps distinguish technology from nature in animal contexts--e.g. chimps fishing for ants using sticks, dolphins using bubbles to trap fish, birds dropping clams onto rocks to open them.

We think of chimps & sticks, dolphins & bubbles, and birds & clams & rocks as part of nature, but when intention--choice--enters the picture you get simple technological systems! If it works in those contexts then I know it works in ours.

Choices are driven by preferences, and preferences are driven by values, so for the purposes of this thread we can think about how the values of permaculture inform our preferences and then how those might be expressed as choices. It's this process of making the choice to use or not use a given tool that is important, more than whether that tool ends up getting used or not used.

Two people can use the same gardening app but if person A does it because he always uses apps for everything and it would never have occurred to him not to, while person B does it because she stopped and thought about her options first and decided using the app still would be a valid expression of her permaculturalist values while fulfilling her goals, then person B is using technology in a permaculturalist way, while (I would argue) person A is not.

Ned Harr wrote:
Two people can use the same gardening app but if person A does it because he always uses apps for everything and it would never have occurred to him not to, while person B does it because she stopped and thought about her options first and decided using the app still would be a valid expression of her permaculturalist values while fulfilling her goals, then person B is using technology in a permaculturalist way, while (I would argue) person A is not.

Masterful — and I do not mean that mockingly, but with genuine respect.

I completely agree. We are free to use technology; it can even be a good thing, and not something to be rejected simply for the sake of preserving the old.

But its use must be conscious.

Thank you.