Domain 4 · Mentors and Teachers
Tomas Remiarz
Ethics, ecological limits and forest gardens in practice
Tomas Remiarz assessed my intermediate Diploma portfolio and materially changed how I treated permaculture ethics. His feedback helped move the ethics from an introductory declaration into an active design tool used throughout goals, analysis, design, evaluation and refinement.
Distinctive contribution
Tomas combines long experience in permaculture design and teaching with close study of forest gardens. His book Forest Gardening in Practice draws on established examples, including their setbacks and management realities. His essay Limits? What Limits? examines the contested third ethic and the relationship between ecological limits, consumption, equity and responsibility.
Key drivers and guiding ideas
Tomas encouraged me to treat the ethics as compass points rather than rigid boundaries. He drew attention to formulations beyond Fair Share, including Future Care, Living Within Limits and Redistributing Surplus. This restored the tension sometimes concealed by simplified language: meeting human needs must be reconciled with leaving resources and ecological space for other species and future generations.
Mark’s interpretation
Influence on my work
During the assessment he recognised the strength of my diagrams, the adaptation of GADIE and the increasingly integrated portfolio. More importantly, he challenged me to revisit ethics at every stage of GoSADIMET. Goals can declare the intended ethical direction; analysis can reveal tensions; design can reconcile competing needs; evaluation can test consequences; and tweaking can correct the course. That thinking fed directly into PERMA-SADIMET and my later teaching.
My critical reading
Tomas’s strongest influence was not a new slogan but greater precision. Ethical language can become comfortable and vague. Design makes it answerable to limits, distribution and consequences. That combination of ecological realism and social fairness deserves sustained treatment.