Permaculture is the act of working with Mother Nature, not against her. It's about creating an ecosystem by putting together communities of plants that work cooperatively. It's about building and maintaining healthy soil. Catching and conserving water, naturally. Allowing a habitat for birds and animals, alongside your garden. And being able to eat your bounty, too.
The Origins of Permaculture
Toby Hemenway, permaculture expert and author of (Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, says: "Permaculture uses a set of principles and practices to design sustainable human settlements. The word, a contraction of both 'permanent culture' and 'permanent agriculture,' was coined by two Australians. The first was Bill Mollison, a charismatic and iconoclastic one-time forester, schoolteacher, trapper, field naturalist, and author of the dense and encyclopedic bible of the field, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual. The other is David Holmgren, one of the first of Bill's many students, who has brilliantly expanded permaculture's scope."
The Aim of Permaculture
According to Hemenway, the aim of permaculture is, "To design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create. From these ethics stem a set of design guidelines or principles, described in many places and in slightly varying forms."
Hemenway's 14 Principles of Permaculture
- Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.
- Connect. Use relative location, that is, place the elements of your design in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.
- Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hold useful flows. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield, every gradient (in slope, charge, temperature, and the like) can produce energy. Reinvesting resources builds capacity to capture yet more resources.
- Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a design to perform as many functions as possible. Beneficial connections between diverse components create a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
- Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy protects when one or more elements fail.
- Make the least change for the greatest effect. Understand the system you are working with well enough to find its "leverage points" and intervene there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
- Use small-scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job and build on your successes. Grow by "chunking"—that is, developing a small system or arrangement that works well—and repeat it, with variations.
- Optimize edge. The edge—the intersection of two environments— is the most diverse place in a system and is where energy and materials accumulate or are translated. Increase or decrease edge as appropriate.
- Collaborate with succession. Living systems usually advance from immaturity to maturity, and if we accept this trend and align our designs with it instead of fighting it, we save work and energy. Mature ecosystems are more diverse and productive than young ones.
- Use biological and renewable resources. Renewable resources (usually living beings and their products) reproduce and build up over time, store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements. Favor these over nonrenewable resources.
B. Principles Based on Attitudes - Turn problems into solutions. Constraints can inspire creative design, and most problems usually carry not just the seeds of their own solution within them but also the inspiration for simultaneously solving other problems. "We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities."—Attributed to Pogo (Walt Kelly).
- Get a yield. Design for both immediate and long-term returns from your efforts: "You can't work on an empty stomach." Set up positive feedback loops to build the system and repay your investment.
- The biggest limit to abundance is creativity. The designer's imagination and skill usually limit productivity and diversity before any physical limits are reached.
- Mistakes are tools for learning. Evaluate your trials. Making mistakes is a sign you're trying to do things better. There is usually little penalty for mistakes if you learn from them.
What Next?
Try it out in your garden at home, or in your urban community garden. Use rainwater collection barrels for water use. Learn more about cover crops. Learn about interplanting, and what crops grow well in tandem, preventing weeds (I plant lettuce under my broccoli, for example). Learn about what plants host beneficial insects, what plants hosts beneficial birds, what plants you can let your chickens roam in, how you can eat those pesky weeds (and which ones are edible), and what on earth is a nitrogen fixer? There's a whole world out there of amazing permaculture possibilities.
