Toby Hemenway – July 6, 2014
One of my pet projects is to clean up the ambiguities and logical inconsistencies that weaken permaculture terminology. Today I take aim at the term Zone 00, used to mean either the designer or user of a permaculture design, or their inner state. It’s a concept spawned by good intentions, but calling it a zone is logically inconsistent, redundant, and worst of all, has no design use. The designer’s mind is a crucial influence, but it’s not a zone. If it’s an influence on a design, that makes it a sector, right? (If you just slapped your forehead and said “Doh!” then you need read no further.) So let’s stop using the term zone 00.
First, a little review. Elements in a design are organized into zones according to how often they are visited. In Mollison’s original conception, Zone 1 included the house and the area around it that was visited every day. Zones 2 through 4 were areas of decreasing use and management, and zone 5 meant wilderness. In the late 1980s, some American and British permaculturists started calling the house zone 0. Doug Bullock tells me that this distinction arose because in the subtropical part of Australia where permaculture began, the boundary between indoors and the outdoor area near the house was often indistinct. Houses in those mild climates could be opened to the outdoors, and fostered an indoor-outdoor living style. But in colder climes, the tightly insulated, sealed-up houses were very distinct from the yard, hence a new term, zone 0, came to mean the building only.
Sometime in the early 1990s, various permaculturists noticed that another “space” in permaculture design had been left out: the designer and users, or more specifically, their psychological makeup. This was called zone 0 or zone 00 (I will call it “zone 00” to distinguish it from zone 0 as the house). I can only speculate why this happened, but I suspect it’s because we knew that the designer’s mind was important, and we wanted a permaculture-jargon term for it. Sectors have never been as well understood or mapped as zones have, and we had an orderly, labeled hierarchy in zones one through five. Given the centrality of the designer’s mind, it was easy to just add a new zone inside the other zones and call it zone 00. Easy, but not consistent with the other zones at all.
Obviously, the inner state of the people in a design is a crucial influence. But the term zone 00 was controversial from the start. Zone 00 is mentioned in many permaculture courses, but it has had only spotty integration into the curriculum and only partial acceptance by teachers. Opponents of the idea include Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, Rosemary Morrow, Scott Pittman, and myself, to name only a few.
One objection to calling the designer’s mental state a zone is that this use is utterly inconsistent with the other uses and properties of the zone concept. Zone 00 is based on a category error—that is, it shares no important properties with the other things called zones. Here’s what I mean by that. The zone system refers to physical areas or a set of conceptual spaces, in which we place elements by frequency of use. Even if a zone is conceptual, as in Bart Anderson’s urban zones, which are apportioned by the type of transportation he uses to reach them (foot, bike, bus, etc.), we can move elements in and out of zones. Zone 00 doesn’t fit that category. I can move design elements like ponds or greenhouses into the other zones, but not zone 00. The things I might conceivably move into zone 00—emotions, ideas, my lunch—aren’t used in the other zones. That reveals a disjuncture—a breach in logical types—between Zone 00 and all the other zones. Zone 00 doesn’t act like the other zones and it can’t be used in design the way a zone can.
Another break between zone 00 and true zones is that logically zone 00 should be the innermost zone, the way zone 0 is bounded by zone 1, which in turn is surrounded by zones 2 through 5. But zone 00 can be located in any other zone depending on where the designer goes. So when I am in zone 4, where is zone 00? When I leave my design site, what happens to zone 00? Does it disappear from the design while I am gone and then reappear when I return? No other zone moves around or leaves the design altogether like that. (Sectors do that.) And the qualities of zone 00 change constantly with the mood of the person, whereas the other zones have fairly fixed locations and properties. Also, what happens when there are multiple users on the site? Do we now have six zone 00s wandering around the site, all in various other zones? How do roaming zone 00s fit into the essential zone concept of location and frequency of use? They don’t. These are more breaches in category.
The user or designer also influences the design in ways that no zone does. The designer, as zone 00, creates the zones in a design and dictates what is in the zones. But a true zone does not design the other zones or specifically dictate the contents of the other zones. All of this shows the logical inconsistency in calling a mental state or a person a permaculture zone.
Zone 00 is also elitist: It privileges the human above all the other beings in the design. If zone 00 is the mental state of the user, then why aren’t we applying zone 00 to the livestock, wild creatures, and pets in the design? They use the design, and their states influence the design. Zone 00 is a species-ist term.
My biggest objection to the zone 00 concept is that it leads nowhere. It is barren. Though it reminds us, “We need to consider the state of the designer and users,” there is no way to use the zone 00 idea as a zone. You can’t arrange elements in it, you can’t locate it with respect to the other elements, you can’t move elements into it from other zones, you can’t do anything with it as a zone other than give it a name. Zone 00, as a zone, does not help make design decisions the way that the other zones do. It’s useless, beyond serving as a placeholder for the obvious idea that the state of the people in a design is important. If anyone has found a good way to actually design with zone 00—as a zone, not in some other way—please tell me. I’d love to hear it.
Do you see what a mess the term zone 00 creates? We’ve pinned a worthy sentiment into the wrong category. Let’s move it to the right category. Zone 00 is just unnecessary jargon for the word “designer” or “user,” and it’s erroneous jargon to boot.
So what are the designer’s person and mental state? They are primarily influences, which makes them most useful in design as sectors. Like any sector, the designer and her state of mind are energies affecting the design that we harvest, block, or otherwise use by placing elements in a beneficial relationship to them. Like other sectors, these are influences that we have little direct control over. (Perhaps a few ascended beings can control their mental state, but most of us can’t!) When we think of mental states as sectors, now we can design for them. We can do something with them, unlike when we think of them as a zone. And as with any sector, we ignore the designer’s mental state at our peril.
Zone 00, though a nice intention, is redundant jargon, a category mistake, and an unusable concept. I realize that the term has made its unfortunate way into the permaculture vocabulary and it may be hard to chase it out. But if you care about logic, clarity of thought, accurate use of language, and being consistent—or if you don’t want to be thought foolish by those who do—you’ll stop referring to zone 00 and instead use the term “person,” “designer,” or “me.” Let’s talk about our states of mind as sector energies instead, so that we can actually design with them.
I agree that the notion of Zone 00 as a mental field is nonsensical but it may be less ridiculous to postulate an internal ecology.
The recent research on gut biota suggests that the gut is ‘living’ in exactly the same sense as the soil. That is, the gut flora and microbiology is a subtle highly interconnected ecology whose ‘balance’ or lack thereof is reflected in the health and well-being of the individual. One could view one’s internal microbiology as something to be ‘permacultured’ in the same way as a vegetable garden or food forest.
Perhaps Zone 00 might reflect the internal ecology of the individual and a permaculture focus might see us learning to ‘farm’ our gut biota much like a landscape. Indeed ProBiotics and microbial supplements like ProEM are often used in this way.
Just a thought.
Toby I know its more jargon but what do you think of the term “inner landscape?” Calling the designer’s mind “designer” or “me” maybe doesnt bring the notion that you can be a steward of the mental state, which will in turn affect yiur relationships to the outer landscape and community. And not only ascended beings can learn to do that. there are very simple positive thinking techniques and practices to bring the mind under control. After all, you wouldn’t want an angry or drunk person to design your garden but you would want a peaceful one too. and you can work towards inner peace.
Permaculture ‘zones’ bother me… I live in a temperate part of Australia, which is fast turning into hot, humid prolonged spring / summer and I need to protect the immediate outside of my home with both deciduous and rainforest type plantings (palm, edible fruit trees, ferns and plants which require shade). Now my mission is to just keep that sun off and have all those part shade to sun plants, firmly in the cool. I just cannot fathom why for example, anyone in this coastal strip, would grow herbs and veggies close to the house. I like walking through my garden up to the veggie garden and into the orchard, around the herbs and little guilds of plants. It’s not a waste of energy as the zonal planting suggest… huh?
We do need to be flexible. The zone system is a design tool, not a set of dogmatic laws. If you need shade near your house,then that’s what you should create. Greens and herbs often don’t like the blasting tropical sun anyway, so a good canopy over them could by helpful. I like having greens close to the house as I am more likely to use them when I’m on the run and don’t have time to stroll through the whole garden every day, but if there are other things more appropriate to zone one, then put those things in zone one instead.
1) zone 00 is a physical and conceptual place which the highest frequency of use
2) I can move an apple in to my zone 00 and output compost from my zone 00.
3) I visit zone 00 more frequently than other zones
4) Where in the definition of zones are zones required to be geometrically bound by a zone of higher number? A zone five can be surrounded by zone four for example.
5) Must each zone be contiguous like US Congressional districts? Can they not exist in isolated pockets within the same design, I have seen designs with multiple zone two areas
6) Zones don’t change over time? Don’t seasons change the quality and function of zones? am I visiting my zone 1 garden twice a day in the dead of winter?
7) I don’t see zone 00 as the only the mind, rather as myself, notwithstanding that,
8) My mind is capable of designing new things that I do not have instinctual programming to do. You consider recognition of that as elitist, there are measurable and capability differences.
9) Nature itself is species-ist, food web, reclamation, succession.
10) Perhaps you see zone 00 as the designer, I see myself as part of the design. A designer can benefit from Systems Thinking, See Work the System by Sam Carpenter, in it he says over and over again, to Take an exterior and slightly elevated view down onto yourself and other elements of the system.
11) Perhaps for you zone 00 is barren and gets you no where, but for me, I matches many of the categorical descriptions of zones in general and I can do several things with zone 00 as a zone.
Zone 00 is defined as the inner state of the designer or user. If you want to change the definition and say it is a physical object (a whole person) then we’re not talking about the same thing anymore, and that shifts the whole discussion. A conversation falls apart when people don’t define their terms in a similar way, so I can’t go along with redefining it and then arguing from the new definition (It’s as if I am describing an apple fruit and you say, no, an apple is a tree and a tree is wood. Of course nothing I say about an apple fruit makes any sense once it’s been redefined as a tree). Your new usage is not the one used by the people who came up with the term (Andrew Langford and several others) or by most permaculturists.
I agree with pretty much all the other points you make. Zones change over time, they are not contiguous, zone five can be surrounded by lower-number zones, and nature is definitely discriminatory. I don’t believe my article suggests otherwise.
There is too much emphasis about Zone 00. It often seems a standalone, neverending, project about your own psychological, spiritual and relational growth and developement, not connected with a concrete permacultural design project, as if it exists by itself.
Anything which cannot be taken to its logical extreme cannot be considered logical. Either permaculture is inherently external, which is not yet written into its stated design goals, or it does in fact include as many zones as you can find in either direction, inward, outward. In order to bring Zone 00 into accord you don’t need to bend exterior permaculture to it, you need to figure out how it relates to exterior permaculture.
By switching the designer “influence” from zones to sectors, Toby repeats the 00/000 error–IMO.
But it really doesn’t matter IMO because zones and sectors are simply ways of categorizing variables in the process of whole-system landscape design–ways that are possibly unnecessary and misleading. (Yet another example of overemphasis on a particular “recipe.”)
The human being is a crucial design element. We are an integral part of the whole. We “design” our Zone 00 in many ways, including our food choices, how we care for our gut microbiome, etc. Neglecting this Zone in design and in the life of the human being is unfortunately common. The overall soil health of all of the Zones, or lack of health plays a crucial role in the design of Zone 00. The are inextricably connected.
What if the Zone-00 was not the mind of the designer but the mind of the client (or the potential pupil) or perhaps more desirably the minds of the greater general public who still believe that permaculture is practised by a bunch of long-haired hippy farmers..? (Metaphorically the masses have a mind that looks something like a highly-cultivated, modern, monoculture farm, primed for a full permaculture design; we should be excited by the challenge.) If this were the case could we use our observational skills to assess where the human mental detritus is and what we can do to overcome what is, at very least, a brainwashing and human apathy? The world we live in is an Edward Bernays, corpocracy, perception, deception, designed to keep us locked into the fallacy that we can continue with unlimited growth in a finite world. We need to put a pin in that propaganda bubble.
The last chapter of Bill’s book comes the closest to overcoming the ”human” issue, it’s great! but we need to make it more than an idea because with greater human buy-in it might actually succeed. If the masses had the right attitude, were educated and inspired they would come gladly down the salvational path rather than the suicide route. Do we not need a 15-chapter, and addendum to Bill’s great work to tell us how to cultivate permaculture into peoples minds? Wouldn’t Zone-00 be the perfect title explaining exactly where we had to go? Could Zone-00 be broken down into sectors and elements where those with the skill set could apply their trade and get more people involved?
A strategy based around the concept of ”designing” the mindsets of the public around ecology and reinserting the human species back into nature should be the permaculturist teachers priority and there seems to be nothing out there that formally attempts it; we all do this-and-that but we are generally preaching to the already converted who lucked onto permaculture somehow.
Mollison’s ideas were epic but they are a set of skills relatively easily learned. An idea, like the human heart, needs action to bring it to life and the actions needed, need willing enthusiastic hands.
Though I’m sure permaculture numbers are expanding we are nowhere near tipping-point and as a race, we may not realise it but even with Bill’s book, we may soon, still need CPR.
If my concept of Zone-00 can incite a conversation and ideas that will get more people involved in this potential environmental revolution it must be a good one. The mindset of our species is how where the battle lies and I commend this idea of Zone-00 as a strategy of where we now need to focus the fight.