Function-focused cross-index thread -- top 10 for each of top 10 functions

I wanted to bring this idea up in a new form, and start a thread with hopes that others will chime in.

The idea is to have a cross-index in which you can find good starting places for learning about a given function, such as heating, food-production, community-creation, dealing with legal sectors, etc. Earlier I'd suggested organizing the forum around function (instead of elements, like growies, homesteads, etc.), but this would be a ton of work obviously. But it could be just a thread that would accomplish the same thing as a cross-index.

This could include actual links to actual threads, or simply key words that get you started on a search and help you get information organized. It's more intended for a newcomer to permaculture, but it could also help for more expert people to exchange information more relevantly.

Here are the functions I think are most essential to any human (and therefore essential to any human trying to become more permanently-cultural) in something like a real order of urgency for survival:

* safety (from predators/armed attackers/extreme poisons/self-inflicted death)
* air (clean enough to breathe)
* heat
* dry/shelter
* cooling
* food
* body's curing--curing of disease, setting of fractured bones
* body's health--maintenance and development
* social connection/communication/community
* purpose/wisdom/beauty/learning/interest
* convenience of amount of work needed to gain elements that serve the above functions

I don't know if my "hierarchy of needs" is really accurate, but anything worth doing is worth doing badly. I also don't know if my starting points for these will be competent, particularly in emergency situation protocols, but I'm just getting the ball rolling and I hope that other geniuses with more experience and common sense will chime in.



[Edit:
Supplemental functions/subfunctions:

food preservation
food preparation
food holding for eating (plates/bowls/substitutes)
potable water
cleaning--body
cleaning--home
cleaning--plates/silverware
waste handling, human, #2
waste handling, human, #1
waste handling, toxic gick from the old-paradigm world
soil detoxification
water, for soil moisture content ("irrigation" in the old paradigm)
water, for plants indoors/pots
water for washing foods
light
electricity (though this is more of an element)
tele-communcations -- internet, phone


oops these really didn't get covered in the initial list. d'oh.]



Obviously, these are interconnected. If you are getting rained on, it's hard to stay warm, if you have a broken leg then the threat of a bear or someone hostile is much increased. Without a sense of purpose, you probably won't have motivation to keep doing exercise or taking medicine or herbs, and without an adequate amount of convenience you might eventually get too frustrated with idealism and go back to the (unsustainable) city. Of course, there's also room for error in perception vs. reality. I started out thinking this thread would be easy to start but already I had to adjust my thinking several times just in writing it out. Maybe it shouldn't be focused on survival even, I'm not sure, but oh well.

We could start with easy ones, like heat, food, shelter.

Seems to me it's natural to start out thinking in terms of elements, and it takes reflection to organize thinking around functions. So this thread wouldn't need to create anything new to serve its purpose of helping people get from point A to point B of where the info is they need to move forward.

I'm thinking I'm willing to edit this thread to keep it organized, and so if you reply to it and say what function you're responding to at the top ("function: shelter") then I'll try to update a reply on this thread to include what you posted.

--

Another problem I don't have an answer for yet is over-function-focusedness: sometimes you just need the element, and you don't have the time/patience/resilience to figure out how to use something that isn't what you were looking for to solve your problem/meet your function need. I want to cook my food, I don't know how to operate a solar cooker, and also you didnt tell me I needed to use it in the daytime on a sunny day and now it's 6pm and I'm screwed. Then sometimes you have an element in mind because of other functions it serves you didn't realize were important until the new element disappointed you (I want a fire because it makes me feel connected to my ancestors, and I love the sound of a crackling fire, and you can't tell stories around a passive solar window the same way you can tell stories around a campfire.) But I think it's just a counter-balance to being element-happy, which I recognize as my tendency and seems to be a common trait in our acculturation and habitual tendency of thinking.

function: dry/shelter


elements:

* for fastest result: debris hut



"natural building"

cob building

straw bale construction

squatting

retrofitting

passivhaus construction

timber frame construction

clay-slip

wofati (Mike Oehler house construction--really short version is: a bunch of trunks supporting the walls, with an earth roof sloped so that all water has a complete path to the ground)

igloo

tipi

tent

cave/bridge/overhang


(auxiliary function these may serve: much heat, some safety, some beauty, some cooling, some social (in the building process), some purpose (in the building process, some learning in the designing and building processes)

function: air

for emergency: put cloth or mask over nose, get below the toxic thing or above it (is it lighter than air or heavier?) Lying down decreases air needed, can make air supply last longer. Can the toxin be contained? putting a blanket over it? sealing it under water?

How to Grow Clean Air -- B.C.Wolverton (plants used by NASA to clean air)
* English Ivy
* Boston Fern
* philodendron

Andrew Faust (permaculture teacher) has info on this

* air-pollinated plants tend to be the ones whose pollen leads to allergic reactions--healing the allergy is one route to dealing with this, living near or planting plants that one is not allergic to.

function: heat

Erica Wisner is a great resource. (Most of what I know about this I learned from a few conversations with her. Thanks Erica for taking the time!)

for emergency: yourself/the earth/the sun/a safe fire/debris hut.

You are a heat source: if you can insulate around yourself enough you will heat yourself up--or heat the interior of a debris hut enough--to survive and perhaps even be comfortable. One of the biggest heat losses is through breathing--if you can insulate without suffocating yourself you can keep a lot of your internal heat.

If you can bury yourself in the earth, you can maintain 53 degrees Fahrenheit, the constant temperature of the earth all over the world in any season. In colder places you would need to get deeper to reach this temperature.

The sun is up to 1000 watts per square meter if not shaded or diffused by haze or at very low angle (late in day, wintertime in high latitude parts of the world/near or in arctic or antarctic circles.)

a debris hut can be built in about 6 hours by one person of average strength, without tools, by assembling bits of fallen wood.




adobe

cob

thermal mass

earth bag construction

"earthship"

passivhaus

passive solar

solar oven

rocket mass heater

compost pile--food scraps

compost pile--wood chips/leaves/non-edible things that wouldn't attract animals

animals, domestic (chicken-sized or larger--kept in a chamber under your house they heat the house with body heat which rises)

reflectors of sunlight (mirrors, aluminum foil, ponds, mica, windows, metal sheets -- CAREFUL you could burn yourself or start a fire)

focusers of sunlight (lenses, fresnel lens, glass bowl of water in parabolic shape)


for heating food:

solar oven

solar cooker/stove

rocket stove

woodstove

rocket mass heater

biogas cooker (methane)

Supplemental functions/subfunctions:

food preservation
food preparation
potable water supply
cleaning--body
cleaning--home
light
electricity (though this is more of an element)
tele-communcations -- internet, phone


oops these really didn't get covered in the initial list. d'oh.

Function: community


living together--housing cooperatives:
>>>intentional community
>>>neighboring/neighborliness

temporary being together:
>>>free associations/meetups
>>>food coops
>>>selling cooperatives (farmers cooperatives, cooperative winepress or nut processing)

"city repair"

workday being together:
>>>worker-owner coops

web forums (like this one, permies.com)
sharing what you know
learning from others
celebrating others and being celebrated
sharing videos
festivals
city repair
homeschool cooperatives, unschool cooperatives
volunteering/work parties

Function: * purpose/wisdom/beauty/learning/interest

BEAUTY:

gardens
"growies"
"critters"

building
building section of permies.com


community
gathering to sing, make local physical artworks
city repair -- making beauty in city spaces and gathering people together


LEARNING/INTEREST (INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION):
* designing a permaculture design
* learning from others, taking a PDC, teaching
* learning chemistry involved in soil health, plant health, microbe and plant and fungal interactions, systems interactions, systems theory
* learning physics involved in heat design--capture + storage, reflection, insulation, circulation, production
* planetary use footprint: analyzing and chopping down your carbon and water footprint, examining all the flows in and out of your life--carbon and water footprints of foods eaten, medicines used, transportation, shelter production and maintenance, communications used (with non-local power supply--for example a cell tower or an internet hub transmitting information for you but powered by their own power supply that does not show up on your personal electric bill).
* systems theory
Donella Meadows -- Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
wisdom
intentional community
neighboring
examining zone 0/negative zones (the self)
coordination
Alexander Technique
FeldenkraisTM Method
BodyMind Centering
Skinner Releasing Method
Taiji/Qigong (Tai Chi, Chi Gong)
Yoga
Martial Arts
thinking tools
Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono)
True Purpose (Tim Kelley)

Initiation
Of Water and the Spirit --- Malidoma Some
Men's work, Women's work--
ManKind Project
The Woman Within
Sterling Men's Weekend
Actual indigenous initiation (you should be so lucky--you probably aren't reading this list then)
Bat/Bar Mitzvah
Confirmation
Twelve Step programs
True Purpose -- Tim Kelley
Plant Spirit Medicine

function: light

using plants to power a LED--two technologies: https://permies.com/t/52726/energy/Turning-Plants-Circuits-photosynthesis-produce#428289
hand cranked battery-powered rechargeable flashlight
solar charging flashlight
light the book, not the room (reading lamp)

I'm currently halfway through "Thinking in Systems" and it's really interesting (*understatement alert*) [Full disclosure: I follow my patient husband around the house reading it aloud to him.] Good book. Which has led me to search for related topics at the forum...which led me to your posts here.

I was interested to see that you were thinking of adding to the usefulness of the forum by categorizing differently than before. So the idea is that the elements of the forum categorizations ("critters", "building," etc.), which are currently named for elements of human systems on the website, could be renamed and recategorized according to their functions in human systems, i.e., how they work together for various goals. (However, I see that they would still be "elements" of the forum, whatever they were called in the tabs "a rose by any other name...")

The various users of the forum seem to do a very good job of seeing and making connections regarding the elements and their functions. This mode of thinking seems to be going on among the people posting and replying to each other here. Perhaps that is the very purpose of the system of a forum?

Rachel Lindsay wrote:I'm currently halfway through "Thinking in Systems" and it's really interesting (*understatement alert*) [Full disclosure: I follow my patient husband around the house reading it aloud to him.] Good book. Which has led me to search for related topics at the forum...which led me to your posts here.

I was interested to see that you were thinking of adding to the usefulness of the forum by categorizing differently than before. So the idea is that the elements of the forum categorizations ("critters", "building," etc.), which are currently named for elements of human systems on the website, could be renamed and recategorized according to their functions in human systems, i.e., how they work together for various goals. (However, I see that they would still be "elements" of the forum, whatever they were called in the tabs "a rose by any other name...")

The various users of the forum seem to do a very good job of seeing and making connections regarding the elements and their functions. This mode of thinking seems to be going on among the people posting and replying to each other here. Perhaps that is the very purpose of the system of a forum?

Thanks Rachel, I'm not sure I understood what you write but I think you're saying it's already organizing by functions, and I would say it is to some extent but there's more to go.  It's a general human tendency to focus on things rather than abstractions.

A simpler solution occurs to me, rather than cross-indexing the whole forum, just the sub forum sections themselves.  E.g., rocket mass heaters subforum would come up under a search for "air conditioning" "cooling" and "heating" and "carbon footprint reduction" since it serves all those functions.  Whatever is in that subforum will now be at least relevant to your search, even if you're not arriving all the way at the right thread within the post.  You're in the right ballpark.

The cross index would be very short and sweet, keeping a limited number of human needs that can be fit onto a single page.

Food
Shelter
Ethical footprint
Community
Health
Etc.

Then sub-categories, e.g.:
Shelter--energy production and storage, dryness, warmth, cooling.


Ethical footprint--
Supporting biodiversity -->?? Forum, purity
Boycotting destructive stuffs/reducing dependencies -->frugality forum
Sourcing locally --> gardening forum, wofati, frugality, ungarbage


This is brainstorming, I'm not sure there are the best fit.

It would be so hard to categorize the functions, though, since they are so interwoven!

"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food" would incline me to include diet and medicine with exercise and other aspects of "well-being." It's not going to be easy to demarcate the boundaries of functions as elements, I guess, because as you say there is a human tendency to gravitate to the concrete.

This is why I find mind-maps/idea maps so useful. With those we organize information and subtopics as branches instead of discrete units, which I think help us mentally approach things as being dynamic parts of systems (functions) rather than only static parts (elements).  

Good idea. There could be a 2-dimensional, and search-able, map that shows overlapping circles of relevance.  

E.g., Food overlaps with medicine, but mainly-medicinal plants can't be a staple food supply.  They overlap, but are not coterminous.
A rocket mass heater does heating way more than it does cooling, but it does cooling too...if your first need is just to get cool, shade or a body of water to dunk in or a mister would be more direct and more immediate, but the rocket mass heater does the job too more flexibly (you don't have to be wet or do anything mostly once it's built and just sitting there).

That brings in another dimension of time, of course, but 3 dimensions makes it too complicated to fit on a piece of paper.  I like the idea of just 2 dimensions.


A diagram like that would help orient someone newer to permaculture, and start to learn where to look for the right elements.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:It would be so hard to categorize the functions, though, since they are so interwoven!

"Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food" would incline me to include diet and medicine with exercise and other aspects of "well-being." It's not going to be easy to demarcate the boundaries of functions as elements, I guess, because as you say there is a human tendency to gravitate to the concrete.

This is why I find mind-maps/idea maps so useful. With those we organize information and subtopics as branches instead of discrete units, which I think help us mentally approach things as being dynamic parts of systems (functions) rather than only static parts (elements).