In permaculture we learn that everything in nature has an order. It was hard for me personally to see this before I took a permaculture design course. I would look at a forest and see nothing but chaos. Leaves and branches every which way made it confusing and very difficult to look at and harder to try to find green fruits in amongst the green foliage. I had to put on a new lens to come to the realization that everything in nature is ordered. Forests are ordered (the 7 layers of a forest, there can be even more layers if we are in different sub-climates or count things such as fungus), the flowers in the forest with 5,6, or 7 petals are ordered, aquatic systems are ordered, the fish and crustaceans in the aquatic systems are ordered, horses are ordered, birds are ordered, humans are even ordered (we are an order of 7, come to a PDC and re-align your lens to see how this works)
There is a principle in permaculture called the Principle of Disorder which states:
Order and harmony produce energy for other uses. Disorder consumes energy to no useful end. Neatness, tidiness, uniformity, and straightness signify an energy-maintained disorder in natural systems.
So order can be found in things working beneficially together. This is something to verily consider next time we are putting together a design for any type of system. We can ask ourselves – am I creating an ordered system that is aligned with natural systems? Or a chaotic system that which consumes massive amounts of resources that needed to be brought in and not used appropriately.
