Permaculture was a concept that Bill Mollison and David Holmgren put together in the 1970s. In the above picture, you see Bill (on the left) who is considered to be the father of permaculture, and to the right is his student, David, known as one of the co-originators of permaculture design.
"Permaculture Design is the first system of conscious functional design in the world; that's its unique aspect, and functional design is sustainable."
- Bill Mollison
It was based on a SIMPLE QUESTION related to the design of agriculture.
"If most of nature is dominated by perennial plants, trees, and other longleaf plants, why is our agriculture dominated by annual crops? Why doesn't it follow the design rules of nature? "
We have gotten used to the idea that for any sort of key problem or important activity, there is one big solution that trumps all others, and some version of it ends up everywhere.
Once we start dealing with nature, local resources, and local situations, then the design solutions are all different.
When you look at a whole system, there are TWO THINGS very undesirable. One is WORK and the other one is POLLUTION.
POLLUTION is a product of WORK.
WORK is a result of not supplying every component of your system with its needs.
EXAMPLE BELOW
If you didn't put a tank on your chicken house, you gotta carry water to the chickens. So you incur WORK.
Now, if you don't collect the eggs from the chicken house, that's POLLUTION.
So, POLLUTION is an unused resource. It didn't go somewhere where it would be used.
Permaculture is actually the whole way we relate to nature. And so, human settlement, the design of houses, and the way we organize everything in society is part of it.
It comes from two Latin words. 'PERMANENS' (to persist indefinitely), and 'CULTURE' (the practices that support human occupation).
Put those together; It's a persistent system that supports human existence.
We eat food. We grow a garden. Why don't we grow the food in the garden and bring those things back together?
Rather than the industrial system which stretches everything out in these long supply chains.
There's another thing that is also extraordinarily intriguing. When you design well, nature takes a hold of what you've done and does it better. All you've got to do is watch the system and guide it slightly.
So, permaculture is really a design system for both sustainable land use and sustainable living.
I suppose the simplest thing to say is: "An attempt to build a good place to live."
Design encompasses VISIBLE STRUCTURES (infrastructure, organic systems of forests and animals, water systems, the things we build, landscape), and INVISIBLE STRUCTURES (legalities under which we operate, financial systems, trusts, and ethics.
We need steady-state sustainable systems because we are pretty obviously living in a very dangerously unbalanced system.
Sea levels are rising. Landmasses are sinking. Deforestation due to expanding mass-scale monoculture crop supply for worldwide export is increasing.
It looks like we've set up a system that's pretty rapidly destroyed itself and some will argue that most areas need drastic redesign.
We need to get our own garden in order. We need to be desperately interested and aware of what's happening around us.
In permaculture, we believe everything is connected to everything else. Every function is supported by many elements.
When we design, design for REDUNDANCY. Say, you are going to heat a house. Don't just heat it with one wood stove. Heat it by heat absorption, on the floors, and through the windows. Heat it by putting solar hot water systems up. Heat it in 10 ways. Make each function redundant.
Every important function should be covered in a lot of ways. Every element should serve many functions. Everything we put in place should be good for several things. We design for FUNCTION.
What is the meaning of 'SUSTAINABLE'?
You hear the word 'sustainable' thrown around everywhere today. It is in every aid organization's proposal there is. However, if you ask someone to define the word 'sustainable' concisely they usually can't, and they often go on and on for five minutes. This means that they can't really get their head around what sustainability is.
SUSTAINABILITY is an energy audit. If a system is sustainable it produces more energy than it consumes. Another way to define it in one simple phrase is the following: "Over the system's lifetime, it produces enough energy to maintain and duplicate itself."
"The way the billion or so middle-class people live on earth, and how they choose to live, is the biggest leverage point that exists in the world."
- David Holmgren.
It is possible for relatively small numbers of the billion or so middle-class people to actually have an influence on the system by what they choose to do individually.
By building this resilience and engaging in enlightened self-interest, and then following a variety of models provided by the permaculture design concept and tailoring it to your own specific needs without the necessity to ask permission from governments, banks, or corporations, we can start changing the world for the better in our own gardens.
We are advocating for small-scale change in our own lives which ends up building a sort of constituency. It may not be very big but it has the enormous advantage that it works as a systemic strike against the system which is destroying the planet.
When we grow our own food and disintermediate that massive chain from the large commercial growers to the supermarket, we are actually taking money out of the centers of power and relocating it down into building that resilience.
When we support other local small businesses, when we do things for ourselves and restart the householding community economies - the non-monetary economies which have always been the basis of every society, whereas the monetary economy has been the icing on the cake - we actually gain political strength, rather than just shouting louder for those at the top to pull the levers of power in some completely different way to then hopefully produce some different outcome to that which they have been producing.
If we are completely dependent, virtually for the air we breathe, on this massive centralized complex system, then we have no political power. When we come from a position of some degree of autonomy, we have much greater power.
Rather than going out there and putting your blood, sweat, and tears into environmental activism, how about you just start creating the world you want to be a part of. If for no one else, then how about for yourself?
"All of the world's problems can be solved in a garden." - Geoff Lawton.