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A bumblebee, visiting the flowers produced by one of my broccoli plants during last
year’s growing season. A great
example of how we can “share the surplus” of our gardens with our pollinator
friends.
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Ah, permaculture… One of my most favorite topics! For many of you who are reading this,
permaculture may be a familiar topic.
For many others, it will be a completely new topic. The idea of using permaculture to
create sustainable human settlements is simple, but at the same time, the
applications are quite broad.
Because permaculture involves so many things, if you were to
ask 10 different permaculturists (of which I am also one, since I took a
Permaculture Design Course two years ago), you will get 10 different
definitions of what permaculture actually is. Today, I will try to define for you what permaculture is
from my viewpoint, and I will share why I believe that it is critical for many
of the issues that we are currently facing in our world today. By the end of this article, I also hope
to spark a love of permaculture in your heart. Okay, I can’t make
you love permaculture, but hopefully you will at least gain an appreciation for
its importance.
What is Permaculture?
At its core, permaculture is a way to live sustainably with
the world around us. It first
began as a design system intended to create permanent
agricultural systems, but has since evolved into a designed permanent culture, including building
sustainable communities and social structures, sustainable agriculture and
growing systems, sustainable economic systems, sustainable buildings and
shelter, and much more. It is a system
where we can design the ways that we live to be more in harmony with the
environment and with each other. It
takes principles found in nature and applies them to our lives and how we
live. It provides a blueprint of practical
solutions to many of our problems of natural resource depletion and brings us
to a place of a more abundant and hopeful future.
Permaculture Offers
Many Solutions
I realize that these descriptions sound quite Utopian. However, with permaculture, many
practical techniques can be found to solve many of the issues that we are
facing in our world today. Natural resource depletion everywhere? Permaculture can help. Loss
of soil fertility?
Permaculture has answers. Erosion problems? Permaculture has answers. Flooding
problems? Permaculture has
answers. Got pollution problems and need some remediation? Permaculture can help. Can’t
grow food anymore on severely degraded land? Permaculture has answers. Too much waste? Permaculture has answers. Water
resource limitations?
Permaculture has answers. An unsustainable economy? Permaculture has a few principles that
can help out with that. Unsustainable agriculture running rampant
everywhere? Permaculture was
created for times such as this!
While I’m not saying that permaculture will solve every single
problem that exists out there, I am saying that it can provide many tools to help
us to transition to a much more sustainable future. For much of humanity’s history, we have focused on
dominating and controlling the landscape, and fighting against nature. Our
tendency to do this as a species was not much of an issue when there weren’t so
many of us living on our planet, and we also didn’t have the technologies that
we have now to make such negative impacts on the land at such large scales. As we became more and more dominant on
the landscape of the Earth and became more efficient in the ways that we did
things, we began to isolate ourselves from the land and we forgot how dependent on nature that we really are. The
truth is, no matter how many “awesome” things that we invent for ourselves, the
realities of natural resource limitations still exist, and we’ll never be able
to invent our way out of every
problem.
We Are Standing at a Global
Crossroad
Today, we find ourselves at
an important crossroad, where humanity must start making some critical
decisions about how we are going to live on this planet, and we must begin to
work with nature instead of against it.
We are currently experiencing the realities of hitting many critical
limits of nature. In Ecology, this
is known as the carrying capacity,
where the existing resources can only supply so much to a growing population of
organisms. I certainly don’t need to
discuss at length how we are experiencing an unprecedented loss of global biodiversity,
increased levels of flooding, pollution, extreme weather, drought and famine,
and things don’t seem to be getting a whole lot better. At the same time, we are experiencing a
lot of economic and social problems in the world today. We are isolated from one another, and
our families are suffering. And,
we keep getting sicker… It is clear that a lot of changes are
needed.  |
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Diagram of a forest garden. One of the great aspects of permaculture design. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening
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A Resilient and Sustainable Future is Possible!
It is true that there are many complicated problems today,
and they cannot be solved overnight.
However, I do believe that we can start to turn a corner and implement some
sustainable solutions that could give everyone a much more abundant and
resilient future. It will take a fundamental
paradigm shift to see that things can be different than they are now, and that
we are actually more personally empowered than we have been led to
believe. Permaculture can be a part
of that future.
Permaculture is based upon the following three ethics: Earth
Care, People Care, and Fair Share. These ethics inform everything done in
permaculture, and are all considered to be of equal importance. Earth
Care is caring for the natural world.
People Care incorporates
taking care of human needs but in a sustainable manner. Fair Share means that the natural world has its limits, and that available surplus
should be shared according to need.
Nature is efficient, and everything gets used and recycled. You don’t find many “hoarders” in
nature, and when you do (squirrels, for instance), the resources do still
eventually get recycled back into the system, not thrown away and buried under the
ground, never to decompose or cause pollution problems.
So what does permaculture actually look like? It’s
as varied as the ecosystems on the Earth, and looks different in each place
that it is applied, so this makes permaculture applicable pretty much anywhere. Permaculture looks like aquaponics, herb
spirals, capturing and storing rainwater, swales,
hugelkultur, lasagna
gardening, vertical growing systems, lots of organic matter to restore the
soil, forest gardens, and an
emphasis on perennial
plants and growing systems. It
looks like local economic systems, community time banks, local currencies, and homeopathic, herbal, and other
alternative and holistic forms of medicine. It looks like CSAs
and investing in your local economy.
It looks like sharing the surplus from your garden or from your fruit
trees with those in need. It
looks like energy and water efficiency, composting, and reducing and recycling
our waste. It looks like reducing
our carbon footprint and reducing or eliminating our commute distances, using
public transit, and using a bicycle to get from place to place. All of these things are just a
start. As you can see,
permaculture is very holistic, and can incorporate many things into our lives
to make ourselves more sustainable.
It gives us a framework to go from just talking about being sustainable
to actually doing these things in our lives.
Permaculture projects that work for some places will not
work for others, simply because climate and environmental conditions, skills, knowledge
of people, and available materials vary from place to place. Permaculture is being used
worldwide for a variety of projects to restore landscapes. It has even been used in the desert to
grow food! Check out the following
video produced by one of the world’s leading permaculture instructors, Geoff
Lawton, about his Greening the Desert Project
to see the power of permaculture in action:
To learn about an update to the Greening the Desert project,
check out this link:
If you are interested in learning more about permaculture, I recommend to you the following books and resources.
Books about permaculture:
Earth
User’s Guide to Permaculture by Rosemary Morrow. A guide to using and applying
permaculture in a variety of settings.
Gaia’s
Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway. A great guide to applying and using
permaculture in urban and suburban settings.
Permaculture
in a Nutshell by Patrick Whitefield. A short and easy to read book that gives you the basics on
permaculture and its applications.
The Permaculture Handbook by
Peter Bane. A practical and
comprehensive guide to permaculture design.
Just a few of the awesome permaculture websites that exist:
Worldwide Permaculture Network
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