Introducing Permaculture

Reader Contribution by Maddy Harland
Published on April 14, 2011
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Permaculture is primarily a thinking tool for designing low carbon, highly productive systems, but its influence can be very pervasive! Discovering permaculture often starts in the garden or on the farm, but permaculture isn’t just about growing food (although it can be a big help with designing productive food systems and I will be talking about this aspect a lot on this blog). Permaculture is a means of connecting each of us more deeply to nature’s patterns and wisdom  — and of applying that understanding in our daily lives. That is the inspirational nature of permaculture.

The disciple of permaculture design is based on observing what makes natural systems endure, establishing simple yet effective principles, and using them to mirror nature in whatever we chose to design: gardens, farms, buildings, woodlands, communities, businesses — even towns and cities. Permaculture is essentially about creating beneficial relationships between individual elements and making sure energy is captured rather than lost in a system. Its application is only as limited as our imagination.

Before we learn the principles and how to apply them, however, there is the bedrock in permaculture: its three ethics. These are its motivation, its heart. They are not exclusive to permaculture, and actually were derived by looking at the commonalities of many worldviews and beliefs. These ethics are therefore shared ethics, indeed shared by most of the world. What permaculture does is make them explicit within a design process that aims to take them out of the realms of philosophy and practically root them in everybody’s lives, transforming thinking into doing. It is their combined presence in a design that has a radical capacity for ecological and social transformation.

Earth Care 

Imagine the originators of permaculture, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, looking at the Australian landscape in the 1970s and seeing the devastating effects of a temperate European agriculture on the fragile soils of an ancient Antipodean landscape. Like the dust bowls of Oklahoma in the 1930s, an alien agriculture has the capacity to turn a delicately balanced ecology into desert. Their initial response was to design a permanent agriculture with tree crops and other perennials inhabiting all the niches, from the canopy to the ground cover and below. The soil is left untilled to establish its own robust micro-ecology. Key to this is that the land must be biodiverse and stable for future generations.

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