Permaculture principles for beginners — No. 4
Story by Loretta Leary, Permaculture Tasmania’s Secretary, extract from Winter 2026 newsletter
Permaculture Principle 4 is ‘to apply self-regulation and accept feedback’
What it means:
It means designing systems to accept natural feedback and adjusting your behaviour accordingly to ensure systems remain productive and don’t cause unintended damage to the environment.
- embrace the feedback loop: observe the results of your actions, learn from mistakes, and make adjustments rather than stubbornly pushing ahead with a failing approach.
- self-regulation: discourage inappropriate or unsustainable behaviour. Model your habits on natural systems, which self-regulate to match the surrounding environment.
- take action: simply observing or hearing criticism isn’t enough; you must actively apply the brakes or pivot when necessary.
How to do it:
In the garden: If a specific crop fails to thrive, don’t keep pumping resources into it. Treat the poor yield as feedback from the system, adjust for poor drainage, or switch to a different plant that suits your local soil type. Don’t keep pouring time, energy and resources into it.
In daily life: Regularly evaluate your workload and energy levels. Setting healthy boundaries and listening to when you feel burnt out allows you to pace yourself and sustain long-term productivity. This is much harder for most of us than it sounds.
This principle, put simply, is DON’T FLOG A DEAD HORSE! And that includes yourself!
This is a principle I need to work on. I need to stop sowing coriander seeds. I need to slow down, take a breath and say no sometimes. I need to step back, take in the big picture and adjust my ways. And sometimes I just need to stop.
