Session 5: What is permaculture?
COVID-19 Community Resilience & Permaculture Course
Session 5: What is permaculture? '
An overview.
Watch the video, follow the graphic, read the text, and finish the learning exercise to complete this session. It might be also good to go again through your key learnings and take aways of the other 4 sessions and see how they all come together in this session. After this session, you will
Know the 3 sources of permaculture wisdom
Have an overview of permaculture
Be introduced into the 3 ethics of permaculture
Learn about the connection between permaculture and deep ecology.
What is permaculture?
How does it interact with gardening or natural farming?
What is permaculture? How does it interact with gardening or natural farming? Where is it actually coming from? All of these questions are essential to figuring out if permaculture is the right design methodology for you.Everything is gardening and so is permaculture. However, permaculture is way more than just gardening or a farming technique. It is a holistic system design and a worldview that is guided by the prime directive of permaculture:The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Even though taking care of the environment and nature is not highlighted explicitly in this sentence, permaculture design is exactly about this. It is an approach to designing ecosystems that are resilient and self-sufficient while meeting human needs.
Permaculture: A merger between permanent and agriculture
In other words, permaculture is a holistic system design approach that works with rather than against nature. “Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems, which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems”. As you can see permaculture started with food and food production; the term permaculture is a merger of permanent and (agri)culture.
Food is super essential to every part of our life, culture and basic needs. And Bill Mollison opened permaculture to other human needs in the preface of his book “Permaculture a Designer’s Manual”:“It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy and shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.”
What is permaculture? by Sketching The Move
Going beyond food was already designed into the concept of permaculture in the very beginning. Even though the first years of the permaculture movement were mainly land-based approaches, pretty soon permaculture was also applied beyond agriculture, food systems or land-based designs. Actually permaculture can design and help us understand every aspect of our lives, or even how society is built and functioning!
Permaculture Design: Allowing ecosystems their own evolution
Permaculture is the toolbox filled with tools and techniques to design, implement, garden, farm, and create sustainable human settlements (such as villages, communities, and cities). Permaculture design is creating the frame and foundations for future actions and interventions.
““It is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all forms”. ”
This one sentence gives a first impression on how much permaculture design actually entails. Let’s chunk this sentence further using Bill Mollison’s wording:
Working with rather than against nature
Protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action
Looking at systems in all their functions, rather than asking only one yield of them
Allowing systems their own evolution.
These 4 bullet points resonate a lot with me and the way flowful is living permaculture design. It is not about the short-term return and focusing on one crop. It is more a holistic approach that allows people, plants, and ecosystems to evolve to fulfill their functions in an ecosystem without having to push too hard. Especially the last one - “allowing systems (as well as people, society, etc.) their own evolution," supports the inner process of letting go of our egos. It reminds us of the human role within the web of life. A web of life that all life on earth relies on.
Permaculture Ethics: Earth Care, People Care & Fair Share
Permaculture is highlighting and balancing these needs in its 3 main ethics:
Care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
Care of the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary to their existence.
Fair share: Setting limits to population and consumption. While covering our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the primary directive of permaculture as well as the Principle of cooperation: “ Cooperation not competition is the very basis of existing life systems and of future survival”.
The three ethics or moral principles are used to guide action and act as constraints. All 3 are basically the essence of various indigenous cultures. In short, they can be used as your north star to guide you in each and every decision or action you want to take.
EARTH CARE
If your action is not serving the Earth, environment or nature in the long run, it won’t be sustainable and may even be destructive, either in your lifetime or in the lifetime of the generation to come. Thus, you want to transition towards actions that are serving the earth and regenerating ecosystems and soil fertility (earth care).
PEOPLE CARE
If your action is self-centered and not supporting the people around you, communities will isolate you and your survival will be based on goodwill or your personal trust in the monetary system. People care is about meeting our basic needs for food, shelter, education, employment and healthy social relationships practicing community dependency (people care).
FAIR SHARE
A community or a complex ecosystem is only as strong as the weakest part/person. By taking care of marginalized groups and reducing injustice, the resilience of a system will increase. This can also mean that everyone needs to reduce their consumption so that the ecosystem can give enough for everyone; This ethic is basically questioning our economic model that is fully dependent on economic growth. Following the business, as usual, might lead us into a collapse of the system, or even worse, parts of the population might die due to injustice. If everybody who is able to reduce their consumption would start doing so, people that are in need would be able to step up without overshooting the planetary boundaries (fair share).
Turning problems into solutions Permaculture & the Club of Rome
Triggered by the report “Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome in 1972, permaculture is looking for ways to live off the surplus of the world rather than mine the core of its existence. One could say that permaculture is turning and shaking the problems of our growth society, our global economy, and the current social model into solutions. The problems might have slightly changed compared to 1972, but even today our society runs on the assumption that growth is unlimited despite the planetary boundaries. Climate change, exploration of natural resources, peak oil, and other environmental problems are reminding us on a regular basis that we should adapt our actions and ways of living in order to stop the mass extinction of ourselves and other species. Of course, permaculture cannot provide the one and the only solution for that but permaculture can help to design ecosystems and human systems that are resilient, regenerative and in a way trying to re-balance the existing discrepancy between human and environmental needs.
3 sources of wisdom
Permaculture design is a collective term that got its wisdom from 3 main sources:
Indigenous knowledge
NatureScience and
technology
Permaculture & Deep Ecology
Bill Mollison and David Holmgren are seen as co-founders of the permaculture design system, a system that was fully described for the first time in the book, Permaculture One, in 1978. Besides the 3 sources of wisdom and the report by the Club of Rome, Bill and David’s ideas and excitement were based on the environmental movement in the 1960s around Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring (1962), James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (1960), and Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology (1972/73).
People behind Permaculture
By searching for the right questions rather than an answer to any question, the concept of Permaculture and the first publications by Bill and David were heavily influenced by people and publications from all over the world that worked on different aspects, tools or techniques we now understand as the core of permaculture design. Masanobu Fukuoka’s “One straw revolution”, Esther Deans’“No-dig gardening”, H.T. Odum’s “Environment, Power and Society”, Russel Smith’s “Perennial tree crops”, P.A. Yeomans’ “Keyline design” and Wes Jackson – are just a few to name. All these existing sources of knowledge and experiences were collected and reframed to serve one purpose: Striving to ask, "What does this land have to give to me?", rather than, "What can I take from this land?"
Definition of Permaculture
Permaculture comes without a proper set of definitions. Manifested by the ethics of earth care, people care, and fair share and keeping the holistic system design approach as well as the primary directive of permaculture in mind, people interpret it based on their own experience and set of values. It is taken in many different ways. (All are kind of right, but at the same time not universal). As new problems are occurring the solutions are changing, too. With that being said, it is still amazing to see how up to date Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer's Manual still is. From the topic side, things will not change dramatically, but as permaculture integrates science and technical improvement alongside nature and indigenous knowledge, more appropriate solutions might occur.
Learning exercise
Today we would like to hear your personal definition of permaculture. So please take some time and define your very unique definition of permaculture. If you are following the course with friends just merge your definition afterward to create a more global definition of permaculture. Please share your definition in the comment section below so we can see the diversity and the similarity.
