PERMACULTURE IS A HOLISTIC DESIGN SYSTEM THAT CAN SHOW US HOW TO CREATE SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS FROM AGRICULTURE TO ARCHITECTURE, FROM CITY PLANNING TO COMPOSTING. IT WILL LIKELY BE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CONCEPTS IN THE COMING TIMES.
Permaculture
Permaculture is a holistic and scientific design system that can inform us how we can create practical, sustainable, and beautiful systems, whether they are agriculture or architecture, city planning or composting.
Permaculture promotes many ideas, including but not limited to: (a) Nature’s design is inherently filled with wisdom and elegance, (b) Humans should recognize this wisdom and elegance and work to incorporate into our own human designs, and (c) We need to develop more sustainable and ethical ways of living with the Earth.
“Permaculture means different things to different people, but at root it means taking natural ecosystems as the model for our own human habitats. Natural ecosystems are, almost by definition, sustainable, and if we can understand the way they work we can use that understanding to make our own lives more sustainable.”
-Patrick Whitefield-
The word “Permaculture” is a combination of the two words “permanent” and “agriculture.” Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who first coined the word, were trying to develop a sustainable form of agriculture in their native country of Australia. The range and scope of permaculture has grown enormously since their first publication, Permaculture One, and has since been expanded to include many activities—wetland construction, sustainable gardening, forest gardens, aquaculture (the growing of fish), green building, city planning, etc.—for this reason Permaculture is also referred to as a combination of permanent and “culture” to include the whole range of human activities.
Permaculture is not simply about parts. It is about relationships, connectivity, patterns, and principles within natural environments and human settlements alike. Thus, it sees the environment not simply as a collection of parts, but the greater whole that emerges from the multitude of interactions and relationships.
CORE VALUES
Permaculture is also more than a simple “design system.” At the heart of Permaculture is a simple but profound ethic of care that calls each one of us individually and all of us together to take responsibility of understanding, caring, and loving for one and other and for home, the Earth. The three core values of Permaculture are:
Peoplecare—the responsibility of Humanity to help and care for one and other, to maintain certain fundamental rights, and to enable each person to achieve their highest dignity by creating healthy and happy communities that live close to the Earth.
Earthcare—a recognition that the Earth is a living system and the source of all life, and that we are wholly part of this system and that the Earth is our only home and therefore we must treat it with reverence, respect, and love.
Fairshares—making sure everybody has the basic essentials in order to grow and prosper, while also calling for an ethical mandate not to consume more than is needed (something Americans could do well to begin to put into practice). The concept of Fairshares is aptly expressed in the phrase “living simply so that others may simply live.”
PERMACULTURE DESIGN PRINCIPLES
From a close observation of natural processes, a general collection of principles and guidelines have been developed for Permaculture practices. They are as follows:
DIVERSITY—Diversity is a mark of a beauty, health, and productivity. It is no mistake that high levels of diversity are found in practically every wild ecosystem. Diversity increases stability and resilience by reducing the threat of pests and disease. For these reasons Permaculture promotes the use of polycultures—growing multiple crops together—as opposed to monocultures—the growing of a single crop. Patrick Whitefield points out that,
“Estimates of the number of edible plants on Earth vary but the total is probably somewhere between 35,000 and 70,000. Some 7,000 are known to have been grown as crops during recorded history. Yet today 90% of our food comes from only 20 plants worldwide, and 60% of it from just three: rice, maize and wheat. These crops can have very high yields and support large numbers of people. But relying on such a small number of plants makes us vulnerable to major new crop diseases, and to climate change. If any one of these crops was to run into serious trouble it would make a hole in our food supplies which could not be filled in the short term.”
STACKING—Stacking is imitating of natural ecosystems by growing within multiple vertical dimensions. Natural woodland ecosystems are generally comprised of three layers or dimensions: small herbaceous plants, shrubs, and trees. Current agricultural practices (such as the generic monocropped wheat or corn field) operate at only on two dimensions of our three dimensional world. In effect, modern industrial agricultures decrease diversity and productivity by not useing the same multi-layered approach that nature takes. This multi-layered approach is called “stacking” in Permaculture.
EDGE—The “edge” is the dynamic boundary where two or more ecosystems converge and which is often the most diverse and productive area. Extending the area and increasing the perimeter of edge ecosystems is a common feature of many Permaculture designs.
LINKING—“Linking” is the replication of the networks of mutually supportive relationships that are found in natural ecosystems. Linking is the placement of components within a system that create these mutually beneficial relationships.
MULTIPLE OUTPUTS—The principle that every component of a Permaculture design should utilize as many products as possible from any given component.
WHOLES—The notion that we cannot simply measure, predict, or define something as a sum of its parts. A living system such as a human being, for instance, is greater than a lump of atoms and molecules found in the human body. An ecosystem is the same way—we cannot describe an ecosystem by merely counting off the number and types of species that live within a certain geographical boundary, because an ecosystem represents the larger whole that emerges from the myriad of relationships and patterns found throughout the natural landscape.
SOIL CARE—Understanding the importance and vital role of soil, care of the soil using sustainable growing practices is a priority in Permaculture design.
ZONING—Things which need the most human care should be placed closest to the home or center of human activity, which establishes a framework for placing systems within human settlements that corresponds to this principle:
Zone 0: The home or the heart.
Zone 1: The home garden where plants that need a lot of care and nutrition are kept and where human activity is high.
Zone 2: Larger, more hardy gardens, orchards, barns and living spaces for livestock, where human influence is still relatively high but not as high as zone 1.
Zone 3: Farmland, pastures, aquaculture, forest gardens, where human activity is moderate.
Zone 4: Grazing land, agroforestry, and woodlands where human activity is low.
Zone 5: Wilderness where human activity is negligible.
Zone 6: The whole Earth where human activity needs to be greatly reconsidered and limited.
Fundamentally, Permaculture is a balance of approaches. In one respect, it is a highly scientific, ecological, systems approach to human design, settlement, and agriculture. In another respect, it is contemplative and intuitive practice that can takes years to develop. In yet another respect, it’s just a good excuse to get your hands into the soil, and to watch things grow.
Permaculture, though only developed into a design system in the past 30 years, is an incredibly significant development that is based on timeless principles that go back tens and hundreds of generations. It is a way of designing human settlements and a way of living ethically and joyfully in the world that is essential—that must be at the heart of the relocalization movement.
To find out how OPOA is trying to encourage the growth of Permaculture and our other initiatives please visit our Action Page.
RESOURCES:
Ohio Permaculture Institute (Coming Soon)
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