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Permaculture Mandala summarising the ethics and principles of permaculture design.
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Permaculture Mandala summarising the ethics and principles of permaculture design.

Permaculture is a design system which aims to create sustainable habitats by following nature's patterns.

The word 'permaculture', coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is derived as a contraction of permanent agriculture, or permanent culture. The idea of permaculture is considered among the most significant innovations developed by Australians in the century since Australian federation [link]. However like "nature", the permaculture concept evolves with time making its definition difficult.

Today permaculture can best be described as an ethical design system applicable to food production and land use, as well as community building. It seeks the creation of productive and sustainable ways of living by integrating ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agroforestry. The focus is not on these elements themselves, but rather on the relationships created among them by the way they are placed together; the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture is also about careful and contemplative observation of nature and natural systems, and of recognizing universal patterns and principles, then learning to apply these ‘ecological truisms’ to one’s own circumstances.

Contents

Origins

In the mid 1970s, two Australians, Dr. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, started to develop ideas that they hoped could be used to create stable agricultural systems. This was a result of their perception of a rapidly growing use of destructive, industrial-agricultural methods. They saw that these methods were poisoning the land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tons of soil from previously fertile landscapes. A design approach called 'permaculture' was their response and was first made public with the publication of Permaculture One in 1978.

The term permaculture initially meant "permanent agriculture" but this was quickly expanded to also stand for "permanent culture" as it was seen that social aspects were an integral part of a truly sustainable system. Mollison and Holmgren are widely considered to be the co-originators of the modern permaculture concept.

After the publication of Permaculture One, Mollison and Holmgren further refined and developed their ideas by designing hundreds of permaculture sites and organizing this information into more detailed books. Mollison lectured in over eighty countries and his two-week Design Course was taught to many hundreds of students. By the early 1980s, the concept had moved on from being predominantly about the design of agricultural systems towards being a more fully holistic design process for creating sustainable human habitats.

By the mid 1980s, many of the students had become successful practitioners and had themselves begun teaching the techniques they had learned. In a short period of time permaculture groups, projects, associations, and institutes were established in over one hundred countries.

Permaculture has developed from its origins in Australia into an international 'movement'. English permaculture teacher Patrick Whitefield, author of The Earth Care Manual and Permaculture in a Nutshell, suggests that there are now two strands of permaculture: a) Original and b) Design Permaculture. Original permaculture attempts to closely replicate nature by developing edible ecosystems which closely resemble their wild counterparts. Design permaculture takes the working connections at use in an ecosystem and uses this as its basis. The end result may not look as "natural" as a forest garden, but still has an underlying design based on ecological principles.

Influences

The term 'Permanent agriculture' was first coined by Franklin Hiram King in his classic book from 1911, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. In this context, permanent agriculture is understood as agriculture that can be sustained indefinitely.

This definition was supported by Australian P. A. Yeomans (Water for Every Farm, 1973) who introduced an observation-based approach to land use in Australia in the 1940's, based partially on his understanding of geology. Yeoman introduced Keyline Design as a way of managing the supply and distribution of water of a site.

The work of Howard T. Odum was also an early influence, especially for Holmgren [link]. Odum's work focused on system ecology, in particular the Maximum power principle, which examines the energy of a system and how natural systems tend to maximise the energy embodied in a system. For example, the total calorific value of woodland is very high with its multitude of plants and animals. It is an efficient converter of sunlight into biomass. A wheatfield, on the other hand, has much less total energy and often requires a large energy input in terms of fertiliser.

Core values

Permaculture is a broad-based and holistic approach that has many applications to all aspects of life. At the heart of permaculture design and practice is a fundamental set of ‘core values’ or ethics which remain constant whatever a person's situation, whether they are creating systems for town planning or trade; whether the land they care for is only a windowbox or an entire forest. These 3 'ethics' are often summarised as;

Everyone needs to eat and drink, and it is the issue of food production where permaculture had its origins. It started with the belief that for people to feed themselves sustainably they need to move away from reliance on industrialized agriculture. Where industrial farms use fossil fuel (gasoline, diesel, natural gas..) driven technology specialising in each farm producing high yields of a single crop, permaculture stresses the value of low-inputs into the land and diversity in terms of what is grown. The model for this was an abundance of small scale market and home gardens for food production.

The permaculture design innovation

The core of permaculture has always been in supplying a design toolkit for human habitation. This toolkit helps the designer to model a final design based on an observation of how ecosystems themselves interact. A simple example of this is how the Sun interacts with a plant by providing it with energy to grow. This plant may then be pollinated by bees or eaten by deer. These may disperse seed to allow other plants to grow into a tall tree and provide shelter to these creatures from the wind. The bees may provide food for birds and the trees provide roosting for them. The tree's leaves will fall and rot, providing food for small insects and fungus. There will be a web of intricate connections that allow a diverse population of plantlife and animals to survive by giving them food and shelter. One of the innovations of permaculture design was to appreciate the efficiency and productivity of natural ecosystems and seek to apply this the way human needs for food and shelter are met. One of the most notable proponents of this design system has been David Holmgren, who based much of his permaculture innovation on zone analysis.

O'BREDIM design methodology

Observation, Boundaries, Resources, Evaluation, Design, Implementation, Maintenance.

Patterns

The use of patterns both in nature and reusable patterns from other sites is often key to permaculture design. This echos the Pattern language of Christopher Alexander used in architecture which has been an inspiration for many permaculture designers.

Permaculture Zones

Permaculture zones classify three dimensional areas according to the amount of human attention needed to maintain the sustainable function of each zone.

Zone 0 The house, or home centre. Here permaculture principles would be applied in terms of aiming to reduce energy and water needs, harnessing natural resources such as sunlight, and generally creating a harmonious sustainable environment in which to live, work and relax.
Zone 1 Is the zone nearest to the house, the location for those elements in the system that require frequent attention, or that need to be visited often.
Zone 2 The vegetable garden, larger scale compost bins and maybe beehives.
Zone 3 Is the area where crops are grown, both for domestic and trading purposes. Would include orchards. After establishment, care and maintenance requirements are fairly minimal providing mulches, etc. are used. Watering or weed control is once a week or so.
Zone 4 Is semi-wild. Used for timber production from coppice managed woodland and the placement of aquaculture ponds.
Zone 5 The wilderness. There is no human intervention here apart from the observation of natural eco-systems and cycles. Here is where we learn the most important lessons of the first permaculture principle of working with nature, not against it.
(The zones do not have to be these things exactly).

Thus, things in Zone 1 will need to be visited more often than those in Zone 3, so Zone 1 will be closer to the home, continuing out to wilderness which should need minimal attention.

Links and connections

Also key to the Permacultural design model is that useful connections are made between components in the final design. The formal analogy for this is a natural mature ecosystem. So, in much the same way as there are useful connections between Sun, plants, insects and soil there will be useful connections between different plants and their relationship to the landscape and humans. Another innovation of the permaculture design is to design a landuse or other system that has multiple outputs. In terms of Holmgren's application of H.T.Odum's work, a useful connection is viewed as one that maximises power: that is, maximizes the rate of useful energy transformation. A comparison which illustrates this is between a wheat field and a forest.

Layers/'Stacking'

In permaculture and forest gardening, seven layers are identified: The canopy; secondary trees; shrubs; Herbaceous layer; ground cover plants; root crops and climbers.

A mature ecosystem such as ancient woodland has a huge number of relationships between its component parts: trees, understory, ground cover, soil, fungi, insects and other animals. Plants grow at different heights. This allows a diverse community of life to grow in a relatively small space. Plants come into leaf and fruit at different times of year. For example, in the UK, wild garlic comes into leaf on the woodland floor in the time before the top canopy re-appears with the spring. A wood suffers very little soil erosion as there are always roots in the soil. It offers a habitat to a wide variety of animal life which the plants rely on for pollination and seed distribution. The productivity of such a forest in terms of how much new growth it produces exceeds the most productive wheat field. It is in this observation of how more productive a wood may be on far less input of fertilizers that the potential productivity of a permaculture design is modelled. The many connections in a wood contribute together to a proliferation of opportunities for amplifier feedbacks to evolve that in turn maximise energy flow through the system.

Polyculture

Polyculture is agriculture using multiple crops in the same space, in imitation of the diversity of natural ecosystems, and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. It includes crop rotation, multi-cropping, and inter-cropping. Alley cropping is a simplification of the layered system which typically uses just two layers, with alternate rows of trees and smaller plants.

Guilds

Permaculture Guilds are groups of plants which work particularly well together. These can be those observed in nature such as the White Oak guild which centers on the White Oak tree and includes 10 other plants. Native communities can be adapted by substitution of plants more suitable for mans use.

The Three Sisters of maize, squash and beans is a well known guild. The British National Vegetation Classification provides a comprehensive list of plant communities in the UK. Guilds can thought of as an extension of companion planting.

Increase edge

Permaculturists maintain that where vastly differing systems meet, there is an intense area of productivity and useful connections. The greatest example of this is the coast. Where the land and the sea meet there is a particularly rich area that meets a disproportionate percentage of human and animal needs. This is evidenced by the fact that the overwhelming majority of humanity lives within 100 km of the sea. So this idea is played out in permacultural designs by using spirals in the herb garden or creating ponds that have wavy undulating shorelines rather than a simple circle or oval.

Perennial plants

Perennial plants are often used in permaculture design. As they do not need to be planted every year they require less maintenance and fertilisers. They are especially important in the outer zones and in layered systems. Ken Fern of Plants For A Future has spent many years investigating suitable perennial plants.

Animals

Many permaculture designs involve animals. Chickens can be used as a method of weed control and also as a producer of eggs, meat and fertiliser. Agroforestry combines trees with grazing animals.

Some projects are critical of the use of animals (see vegan organic gardening). Animals can be poor converters of energy and require a large land area and large amounts of water for a given amount of food produced. They can also have a dramatic impact on the wildlife of a site. This critique is probably better directed at traditional farming where there is inefficient use of animals.

Annual Monoculture (anti-pattern)

Annual monoculture such as a wheatfield can be considered a pattern to be avoided: in terms of space (height is uniform) and time (crops grow at the same rate until harvesting.) During growth and especially after harvesting the system is prone to soil erosion from rain. The field requires a hefty input of fertilisers for growth and machinery for harvesting. The work is more likely to be repetitive, mechanised and rely on fossil fuels.

No pattern should be hard and fast and depending on the design considerations they can be broken. An example of this is [Broadscale permaculture http://www.permaculture.co.uk/mag/Articles/broadscale.html] practiced at Ragmans Lane Farm, which has a component of annual farming. Here the amount of human involvement is a key factor influencing the design.

Energy

Applying these values to the real world means using fewer non-renewable sources of energy, particularly petroleum and nuclear based forms of energy. There is general agreement that the pool of available fossil fuels is shrinking, and burning fossil fuels contributes to greenhouse gasses and global warming. However, using less energy is more than just combating global warming. Food production should be a fully renewable system; but using current agricultural systems this is not the case. Industrial agriculture requires large amounts of petroleum, both to run the equipment, and to supply pesticides. Permaculture is in part an attempt to create a renewable system of food production that relies upon minimal amounts of energy.

For example permaculture focuses on maximizing the use of trees (agroforestry) and perennial food crops because they make a more efficient and long term use of energy then traditional seasonal crops. A farmer does not have to exert energy every year replanting them, and this frees up that energy to be used somewhere else.

Traditional pre-industrial agriculture was labor intensive, industrial agriculture is fossil fuel intensive and permaculture is design and information intensive and petrofree. Partially permaculture is an attempt to work smarter, not harder; and when possible the energy used should come from renewable sources such as wind power, passive solar designs or biofuels.

A good example of this kind of efficient design is the chicken greenhouse. By attaching the chickenshed to a greenhouse you can reduce the need to heat the greenhouse by fossil fuels, as the chicken's bodies heat the area. The chickens scratching and pecking can be put to good use to clear new land for crops. Their manure can be used to fertilise the soil. Feathers could be used in compost or as a mulch. In a conventional factory situation all these chicken outputs are seen as a waste problem. So in factories cooled by huge air conditioners, the chicken waste is extracted and seen as a problem. All the energy is focused on egg production. Thus it is a further principle of permaculture that "pollution is energy in the wrong place".

Holmgren's 12 design principles

David Holmgren has developed 12 design principles for permaculture:
  1. observe and interact
  2. catch and store energy
  3. obtain a yield
  4. apply self-regulation and accept feedback
  5. use and value renewable resources and services
  6. produce no waste
  7. design from patterns to details
  8. integrate rather than segregate
  9. use small and slow solutions
  10. use and value diversity
  11. use edges and value the marginal
  12. creatively use and respond to change

Permaculture design for ecologinomic (ecology-economic) ethics

A basic principle is, therefore to "add value" to existing crops. A permaculture design therefore seeks to provide a wide range of solutions by including its main ethics (see above) as an integral part of the final value-added design. Crucially, it seeks to address problems that include the economic question of how to either make money from growing crops or exchanging crops for labour such as the LETS scheme. Each final design therefore should include economic considerations as well as giving equal weight to maintaining ecological balance, making sure that people working on the project's needs are met and that no one is exploited.

Examples

One way of doing this is through designing a system that has "multiple outputs" For example, a wheat field interspersed with walnuts will reduce soil erosion, act as a windbreak and provide a walnut crop as well as a wheat crop. As there are two crops to manage the work will be more interesting. Here the system comes into conflict with conventional agriculture and economics. By interplanting trees in wheat fields there is a reduction in the wheat yield. The field is also harder to harvest using machinery, as the operator has to drive around the trees. Most farms specialise in one main crop at a time and seek to maximise surplus in order to increase profit. This surplus can only be maintained with a massive injection of fossil fuels. So, as things stand it is quite hard for a permaculture farm to compete with a "conventional " farm in order to grow basic fruit and veg. This does not mean that there is no possibility of making a living from permaculture systems. For example: jam. Jam is more valuable than strawberries. By doing this and making useful connections, permaculture designs can find niches for themselves in our existing socio-ecomomic structure, but it is unlikely that permaculture designs could produce the flood of fresh produce needed to keep 24 hour hypermarkets stocked with goods. Why is this? Perhaps because as systems become more complex the communities of animals and plants are more likely to balance out and massive surpluses of just one crop are harder to arrive at. There is more likely to be a more constant and varied flow of crops over the course of a year. As food has become cheaper it becomes harder to make a living from growing it on a small scale.

Critiques

John Robin of has been one the strongest critics of permaculture who criticised it for its potential to spread environmental weeds: reflecting a divide between native plant advocates and permaculture. [link]. Some critics have argued that permaculture is best suited to tropical, mediterranean or desert conditions, but isn't suitable for a cool temperate country such as the UK. [link]

The perceived lack of evidential data about the performance of the system, and lack of a central body representing the system has also been a source of criticism.

Bill Mollison himself has also been critical of itinerant teachers of permaculture who would go on to teach after only a short course. At one point Mollision unsuccessfully tried to trademark the term permaculture to prevent this practice.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of permaculture is to be found in the Review of Toby Hemenway's book Gaia's Garden, which was published in the Winter 2001 edition of the Whole Earth Review [link]. In it Greg Williams critiques the view that woods were more highly productive than farmland based of the theory of ecological succession which says that net productivity declines as ecosystems mature. He also criticised the lack of scientifically respectable data and questions whether permaculture is applicable to more than a small number of dedicated people. Hemenway's response in the same magazine disputes Williams's claim on productivity as focusing climax rather than maturing forests, citing data from ecologist Robert Whittaker's book Communities and Ecosystems. Hemenway is also critical on Williams's characterisation of permaculture as simply forest gardening, whereas for Hemenway it is more a broadscale design system.[link]

Contemporary examples

In the years since its conception, permaculture has become a successful approach to designing sustainable systems. Its adaptability and emphasis on meeting human needs means that it can be utilized in every climatic and cultural zone. However, at the moment the large proportion of practitioners are only likely to be inspired individuals and there is a distinct lack of broadscale permaculture projects. Nevertheless, permaculture has also been used successfully as a development tool to help meet the needs of indigenuous communities at risk from exploitation by free-market economics.

Permaculture is now well-established across the world and there are some inspiring examples of its use:

Africa

Zimbabwe has sixty schools designed using permaculture, with a national team working within the schools' curriculum development unit. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has produced a report on using permaculture in refugee situations after successful use in camps in Southern Africa and Macedonia.

Oceania

Australia

The development of permaculture co-founder David Holmgren's home plot at Melliodora, Central Victoria, has been well documented at his website and published in e-book format [link].

Designed from permaculture principles [Crystal Waters] is a socially and environmentally responsible, economically viable rural subdivision north of Brisbane (Australia), Crystal Waters was designed by Max Lindegger, Robert Tap, Barry Goodman and Geoff Young, and established in 1987. It received the 1996 World Habitat Award (assessed by Dr Wally N’Dow) for its "pioneering work in demonstrating new ways of low impact, sustainable living". 83 freehold residential and 2 commercial lots occupy 20% of the 259ha (640 acre) property. The remaining 80% is the best land, and is owned in common. It can be licensed for sustainable agriculture, forestry, recreation and habitat projects.

Asia

Indonesia

The Indonesian Development of Education and Permaculture assisted in disaster relief in Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 Tsunami [link]. They have also developed Wastewater Gardens a small-scale sewage treatment systems similar to Reedbeds.

Europe

United Kingdom

Robert Hart's forest garden in Shropshire, England
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Robert Hart's forest garden in Shropshire, England

There are a number of example permaculture projects in the UK, these include:

Other projects tend to be more community oriented, particularly in urban areas. These include Naturewise, a north London based group who tend a number of forest gardens and allotments as well as running regular permaculture introductory and design courses [link], and Organiclea, a workers co-operative who are involved in developing local food growing and distribution initiatives around the Walthamstow area of east London [link].

The UK Permaculture Association publishes an extensive directory of other projects and example sites throughout the country [link].

America

North America

Visit the [Northeastern Permaculture Wikispace] for a comprehensive listing of Events, Permaculture Groups, and Demonstration Sites in the Northeastern US and Canada. [link]

Amazing example of urban permaculture in Los Angeles [Path to Freedom] Ideally, the Dervaes would reside on a couple of country acres in order to live the organic, self-sufficient eco-friendly and health conscious lifestyle they live. Instead, finding themselves in the middle of an urban landscape, on a simple city block in Pasadena, California, the five member family has transformed the 1/5 acre and city home into a sustainable urban homestead that provides them with enough organic and cancer prevention food that they have turned the excess crops into a lucrative home business.

The family is vegetarian, and the yard blooms with over 350 varieties of edible and useful plants. The 1/10 acre organic garden now grows over 6,000 pounds of organic produce each year. The money from the cottage-industry produce business helps fund purchases of solar panels, energy efficient appliances, and a biodiesel processor. The family makes their own vegetable oil-based bio-diesel fuel to run the family car. They have chickens and ducks, and compost with worms.

The Dervaes family is generous in the time they spend showing others what they are doing, from allowing local school children come take a tour to giving how-to workshops to keeping a blog [Path to Freedom Journal]. They protect their health, they protect the health of others, and they protect the health of the planet -- in the way they choose to live. All while living in the middle of a city on a small city lot.

Cuba

Cuba has in the past 18 years transformed their food production using bio-dynamic farming and permaculture. Havana produces up to 50% of its food requirements from within the city limits, all of it organic and produced by people in their homes, gardens and in municipal spaces. Read more about how and why the Cubans made this happen at [The Power of Community] It's very inspiring!

See also

References

External links

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