About Permaculture

Permaculture is the design of living, sustainable systems. You can think of it as careful, conscious design of anything and everything in the landscape (or elsewhere). By following nature's lead in any endeavor, we ensure success, much less survival. In everyday life, this translates to having a natural and positive relationship to all things in your world. We need to get already settled and cultivated lands in proper order (with energy surpluses rather than deficits) so we can stop invading wild lands to get at resources. And we need to help each other. Permaculture offers broad, yet potent insights into what an original, sustainable earth culture looked like and will look like.

Permaculture has been taught worldwide for over thirty years as a 72-hour Permaculture Design Course. Participants completing the course are known as permaculture designers. The curriculum is well explained in Permaculture: A Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison. A host of other books have been added to this original treatise.

On the ground, permaculture designers seek to design buildings, landscapes and every other system we depend on to maximize the positive relationships in and between those systems. At a very basic level, designers need to pay close attention to climate, water, earth resources and vegetation. Many horrors of modern design can be seen all around us. Very few modern developments pay attention to solar gain, storm water use, soil improvement, reforestation with useful species, bioremediation of wastes and pollutants, agriculture and, most importantly, local and open participation. Nature shows us that health and longevity require such things.

Some Principles of Permaculture:

  • Life Intervention Principle: In chaos lies infinite opportunity for creative intervention [evolution].
  • Law of Return: There must be a give for every take.
  • Directive of Return: Every thing must provide for its replacement. (As a condition of use, we should return a greater amount than that used.)
  • Law of Thermodynamics: Universal energy is constant, and the total entropy is increasing. (Designer decides how to best energy before too much entropy [dissipation or uselessness] occurs.)
  • Make the least change for greatest effect. (Be efficient, careful and graceful.)
  • Potential yield is unlimited (but by our [lack of] imagination).
  • Everything gardens (or has an effect on its environment).
  • Oversupply/unused input or output = Pollution (and disorder).
  • Life creates yield.
  • Cooperation is the basis of life on earth.
  • Work with, not against, nature.
  • Beneficial leadership eventually releases the responsibility (of leadership) to the system.
  • Birch’s Six Principles of Natural Systems:
    1. Nothing grows forever.
    2. Life depends on cycling clean air and water.
    3. Extinction occurs amongst too few or too many.
    4. Most species depend on one or two key environmental factors.
    5. Human ability to alter nature increases faster than our ability to forsee the consequences of our alterations.
    6. Each organism has intrinsic value.

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