Permaculture
What is Permaculture?
THE ORIGINATORS
The permaculture design system, devised by Dr Bill Mollison (left) and David Holmgren (right), was first coined in 1976 and set out in their 1st published book "Permaculture One" in 1978.
PERMACULTURE
A more current definition of permaculture, which reflects the expansion of focus implicit in our book Permaculture One is:
'Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs'.
David Holmgren
Permaculture is a diverse set of practices linked by the ethics of :-
care of the earth
care of people
the sharing of resources to help others achieve their needs
and reduce consumption.
Broadly, permaculture can be defined as a system of applied design for the creation of sustainable human habitat.
Permaculture ...
... is a practical concept applicable from a balcony to the farm,
from the city to the wilderness, enabling us to establish productive environments providing our food, energy, shelter, material and non-material needs, as well as the social and economic infrastructures that will support them.
... is a synthesis of ecology, geography, observation & design.
Permaculture encompasses all aspects of human environments and culture,
urban and rural, and their local and global impact.
It involves ethics of earth care because the sustainable use of land cannot be separated from lifestyle and philosophical issues.
... encourages the restoration of balance to our environments through the practical application of ecological principles.
In the broadest sense, Permaculture refers to land-use systems and lifestyle options which utilise resources in a sustainable way.
From a philosophy of cooperation with nature and each other, of caring for the earth and people, permaculture presents an approach to designing environments which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems, to regenerate damaged land and preserve environments which are still intact.
Such a definition implies that permaculture designers are active in a broad range of areas. These include the design of communities, food production and distribution systems, overseas development aid, farming, community economics, town planning, community development, education and media among many others.
Russ Grayson
permacultureinternational.org
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This is a partial reprint of an article that was printed August 1994, in the Tucson Food Co-op News.
©1994 Katherine Wasser
"Permaculture...I know I've heard that term before; doesn't it mean doing organic gardening, or living off the land?"
Such comments typify the reactions of many people I've mentioned Permaculture to; they often think it's just a new name for old techniques or life-styles. In a way they are right, because permaculture design does incorporate many time-honored techniques. But they are also wrong, because permaculture goes far beyond mere techniques, just as it applies to far more than agriculture. The intent of this article is to briefly outline the essential basics of permaculture design.
The term permaculture, meaning "permanent agriculture" was coined in the 1970's by Australian Bill Mollison:
As I saw permaculture in the 1970's, it was a beneficial assembly of plants and animals in relation to human settlements, mostly aimed towards household and community self reliance, and perhaps as a "commercial endeavor" only arising from a surplus from the system.
However, permaculture has come to mean more than just food sufficiency in the household. Self-reliance in food is meaningless unless people have access to land, information, and financial resources. So in recent years it has come to encompass appropriate legal and financial strategies, including strategies for land access, business structures, and regional self financing. This way it is a whole human system.
Permaculture, then, is a design system that encompasses both "permanent agriculture" and "permanent culture." It recognizes, first, that all living systems are organized around energy flows. It teaches people to analyze existing energy flows (sun, rain, money, human energy) through such a system (a garden, a household, a business). Then it teaches them to position and interconnect all the elements in the system (whether existing or desired) in beneficial relationship to each other and to those energy flows. When correctly designed such a system will, like a natural ecosystem, become increasingly diverse and self-sustaining.
All permaculture design is based on three ethics: Care of the earth (because all living things have intrinsic worth); care of the people; and reinvest all surplus, whether it be information, money, or labor, to support the first two ethics.
Practically speaking, a successful permaculture design is based on three guiding principles. First, each element of the system performs multiple functions (for example, an orange tree in my yard supplies fruit for food and a cash crop, rinds for compost, leaves for mulch, dead twigs for kindling, and shade for me, my cat and other plants).
Second, each desired function of the system is supported by multiple elements (further shade in my yard comes from an overhead trellis with grapevines and several native trees).
Finally, and crucial to permaculture design, everything in the system is innerconnected to everything else. This is vital, because the susceptibility and output of a system depend not on the number of elements it contains, but rather how many exchanges take place within the system (think of an old growth forest vs. a monoculture tree farm).
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