Permaculture Design
'Permaculture uses a set of principles and practice 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.
'Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in Tasmanian rain forests. Inspired and awed by the life giving abundance and rich interconnectedness of this ecosystem, he jotted in his diary, ‘I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does.’ In the 1970s he and Holgrem, using what they had observed in nature and in indigenous cultures, began to identify the principles that made those systems so rich and sustainable. Their hope was to apply these principles to designing ecologically sound, productive landscapes. They reasoned that if life had been thriving on Earth over three billion years, if indigenous peoples had been living relatively harmoniously in their environments for millennia, then life and indigenous cultures must have figured out some things about sustainability…
'Permaculture began, then, as a set of tools for designing landscapes that are modeled after nature, yet include humans… It turns out that permaculture’s principles—since they are grounded in nature’s wisdom—have breathtaking scope, far beyond permaculture’s origins in agriculture. Permaculture has been used to design buildings, energy and wastewater systems, villages, and even less tangible structures such as school curricula, businesses, community groups, and decision-making processes.
'How does permaculture do this? Though on one level permaculture practitioners design with organisms, buildings, and those less tangibles that we refer to as invisible structures, they focus less on the objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them—interconnections—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole. These relationships are what turn a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a backyard, a community, or an ecosystem.'
- Toby Hemenway, in 'Gaia's Garden.'
'Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in Tasmanian rain forests. Inspired and awed by the life giving abundance and rich interconnectedness of this ecosystem, he jotted in his diary, ‘I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does.’ In the 1970s he and Holgrem, using what they had observed in nature and in indigenous cultures, began to identify the principles that made those systems so rich and sustainable. Their hope was to apply these principles to designing ecologically sound, productive landscapes. They reasoned that if life had been thriving on Earth over three billion years, if indigenous peoples had been living relatively harmoniously in their environments for millennia, then life and indigenous cultures must have figured out some things about sustainability…
'Permaculture began, then, as a set of tools for designing landscapes that are modeled after nature, yet include humans… It turns out that permaculture’s principles—since they are grounded in nature’s wisdom—have breathtaking scope, far beyond permaculture’s origins in agriculture. Permaculture has been used to design buildings, energy and wastewater systems, villages, and even less tangible structures such as school curricula, businesses, community groups, and decision-making processes.
'How does permaculture do this? Though on one level permaculture practitioners design with organisms, buildings, and those less tangibles that we refer to as invisible structures, they focus less on the objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them—interconnections—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole. These relationships are what turn a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a backyard, a community, or an ecosystem.'
- Toby Hemenway, in 'Gaia's Garden.'