Permaculture is a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements. The word, a contraction of both “permanent culture” and permanent agriculture,” was coined by Bill Mollison, a charismatic and iconoclastic one-time forester, schoolteacher, trapper, and field naturalist, and one of his students, David Holmgren. Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in the forests of Tasmania, and jotted in his diary, “I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does.”
In the 1970’s, he and Holmgren began to develop a set of techniques for holistic landscape designs that are modeled after nature yet include humans. Permaculture’s vision is of people participating in and benefiting from an abundant, nurturing natural world.
Though permaculture practitioners design with plants, animals, buildings and organizations, they focus less on those objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them--interconnections--that will create a healthy sustainable whole. Interconnections are what turns a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a community, a family or an ecosystem.
The aim of permaculture is to create ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethical principals--care for the earth, care for people, and share the surplus. From these stem a set of design guidelines. Some of these guidelines are based on our understanding of nature, such as, “Each element should perform several functions,” and “Use natural plant succession to create favorable sites and soils.” Others are borrowed from stable, long-term societies, such as, “Use renewable resources,” and “Begin the garden at your doorstep.” Many of these design guidelines are given in various books about permaculture, listed in the bibliography. Together they combine to create a way to design sustainable gardens, landscapes, towns, and cultures.
From this it is obvious that permaculture is about much more than gardening. But since permaculture emphasizes the role of plants and animals in human life, many people have come to permaculture through their love of gardening and agriculture.
(the following was excerpted from Cascadia Permaculture Institute Handouts) Primary Principles for Functional Design
Observe. Protracted and thoughtful observations rather than prolonged and thoughtless actions. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. (Areas of shade, wind direction, points of sunrise and sunset, rainfall, etc.)
Connect. Use relative location: Place elements in ways that create useful relationships and timesaving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements create a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements. (Mimic nature; work with it, not against it)
Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hole the useful flows moving through the site. By saving and reinvesting resources, we maintain the system and capture still more resources.
Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a system to perform as many functions as possible. Increasing beneficial connections between diverse components creates a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.
Make the least change for the greatest effect. Find the “leverage points” in the system and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
Use small scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job, and build on your successes, with variations. Grow by chunking.
