David Holmgren - Essence of Permaculture

Contents

Essence of Permaculture was created as an accessible introduction to both the permaculture concept and the principles. Much of the first edition was extracted directly from my book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability , which provides a much more in-depth discussion of these topics. This second edition has not changed substantially, but it contains some updates reflecting changes in society over the 19 years since it was originally published, as well as further clarification of some of the principles.

What is Permaculture?

Bill Mollison and I coined the word permaculture in the mid-1970s to describe an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man[kind].

A more current definition of permaculture, reflecting the expansion of focus implicit in Permaculture One , is:

Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs.

People, their buildings and the ways in which they organise themselves are central to permaculture: the original permaculture vision of permanent or sustainable agriculture has evolved to one of permanent or sustainable culture.

The Design System

For many people, myself included, the above conception of permaculture is so global in its scope that its usefulness is reduced. More precisely, I see permaculture as the use of systems thinking and design principles to provide the organising framework for implementing the above vision. Permaculture draws together the diverse ideas, skills and ways of living that need to be rediscovered and developed to provide for our needs, whilst increasing the natural capital for future generations.

In this more limited but important sense, permaculture is not the landscape, or even the skills of organic gardening, regenerative farming, energy efficient building or eco-village development. Rather, it can be used to design, establish, manage and improve these and all other efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future.

The Permaculture Flower (depicted next opening) shows the key domains that require transformation to create a sustainable culture. Historically, permaculture has focused on Land and nature stewardship as both a source for, and an application of, ethics and design principles. Those principles are now being applied to other domains dealing with physical and energetic resources, as well as human organisation (often called invisible structures in permaculture teaching). The spiral path beginning with ethics and principles suggests a knitting together of these domains, initially at the personal and the local level, and then proceeding to the collective and global level. Some of the diverse design systems and solutions relevant to each domain are listed under the Biological, Built and Behavioural fields, which I used in RetroSuburbia (2018) to simplify the domains framework of the Permaculture Flower.

The Permaculture Flower

Biological Field

Land & Nature Stewardship

Bio-intensive gardening

Forest gardening

Seed saving

Organic agriculture

Biodynamics

Natural farming

Keyline water harvesting

Holistic Rangeland Management

Natural Sequence Farming

Agroforestry

Nature-based forestry

Integrated aquaculture

Wild harvesting & hunting

Gleaning

Built Field

Building

Passive solar design

Natural construction materials

Water harvesting & reuse

Biotechture

Disaster resistant construction

Owner building

Pattern language

Tools & Technology

Reuse & creative recycling

Hand tools

Bicycles and electric bikes

Wood stoves

Fuels from organic wastes

Wood gasification

Bio-char from forest wastes

Co-generation

Micro-hydro & wind

Energy storage

Transition engineering

Behavioural Field

Education & Culture

Home schooling

Steiner/Waldorf education

Reading landscapes

Participatory arts & music

Social Ecology

Action Research

Transition culture

Voluntary simplicity

Health & Spiritual Wellbeing

Home birth & breastfeeding

Complementary & wholistic medicine

Yoga, Tai Chi & other body/mind/spirit disciplines

Spirit of place, indigenous cultural revival

Dying with dignity

Finance & Economics

Ethical investment & Fair Trade

Local and regional currencies

Carpooling, ride sharing & car share

Farmers markets & Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

WWOOFing & similar networks

Tradable Energy Quotas

Life Cycle Analysis & EMERGY accounting

Frugal hedonism

Land Tenure & Community Governance

Cooperatives & body corporates

Cohousing & eco-villages

Native Title & traditional rights

Open space technology & consensus decision making

Sociocracy

The Network

Permaculture is also a network of individuals and groups spreading permaculture design solutions in both rich and poor countries throughout the globe. Until recently, largely unrecognised in academia and unsupported by government or business, permaculture activists are contributing to a more sustainable future by reorganising their lives and work around permaculture design principles. They are creating small local changes that directly and indirectly influence organic agriculture, appropriate technology, intentional community design and other expressions of what is called sustainable development (even if that term is problematic).

Most of the people involved in this network have completed a Permaculture Design Course (PDC). For over 30 years this has been the prime vehicle for permaculture inspiration and training worldwide, acting as a social glue bonding participants to such an extent that the worldwide network could be described as a social movement. A curriculum was codified in 1984, but the divergent evolution of form and content, as presented by different permaculture teachers, has produced varied and localised experiences and understandings of permaculture.