Permaculture

Permaculture is the practice of designing sustainable human habitats by following nature's patterns.

The original meaning of the term permaculture was permanent agriculture , i.e., agriculture that is able to be sustained in a place indefinitely. The meaning has since been broadened to permanent culture , thus including the social aspects of sustainability.  

There are four main ingredients to permaculture:

Shared ethics of "earth care", "people care", and "fair shares" (which is shorthand for limits to populations and consumption, and the fair distribution of resources to further the work of earth care and people care). Permaculture also stresses the importance of taking personal responsibility for one's actions.

Ecological principles derived by the observation of natural systems by ecologists such as Birch and Odum, as well as from successful pre-technological societies.

Design tools and processes that allow an individual or group to assemble conceptual, material, and strategic components into a "pattern" or "plan of action" that can be implemented and maintained with minimal resources.

A plan for surviving the energy descent as oil and gas production peak and begin to decline over the next decade. David Holmgren is increasingly presenting permaculture as the only viable tool for retrofitting the suburbs to survive peak oil in a lifestyle that emphasises the core values above; a wholistic care for local people and ecologies in a local energy based economy.

After the publication of Permaculture One , Mollison and Holmgren further refined and developed their ideas by designing hundreds of permaculture sites and organizing this information into more detailed books. Mollison lectured in over eighty countries and his two-week Design Course was taught to many hundreds of students. By the early 1980s , the concept had moved on from being predominantly about the design of agricultural systems towards being a more fully holistic design process for creating sustainable human habitats.

By the mid 1980s, many of the students had become successful practitioners and began teaching and in a short period of time permaculture groups, projects, associations, and institutes were established in over one hundred countries.

Permaculture has developed from its early days. English permaculture teacher Patrick Whitefield, author of The Earth Care Manual and Permaculture in a Nutshell , suggests that there are now two strands of permaculture: Original and Design Permaculture. Original permaculture closely replicates nature and developing edible ecosystems which may closely resemble their wild counterparts. Design permaculture takes the working connections at use in an ecosystem and uses this as its basis. The end result may not look as "natural" as a forest garden, but still has an underlying design based on ecological principles.

Key to this design process are the ideas of useful connections and multiple outputs. A useful comparison to make is between a wheat field and a forest. A mature ecosystem such as ancient woodland has a diverse number of relationships between its component parts: trees, understory, ground cover, soil, fungi, insects and other animals. Plants grow at different heights. This allows a diverse community of life to grow in a relatively small space. Plants come into leaf and fruit at different times of year. For example, in the UK , wild garlic comes into leaf on the woodland floor in the time before the top canopy re-appears with the spring. A wood suffers very little soil erosion as there are always roots in the soil. It offers a habitat to a wide variety of animal life which the plants rely on for pollination and seed distribution. Its output in a year in terms of biomass exceeds the most productive wheat field. The wheatfield on the other hand offers a monoculture in terms of space (height is uniform) and time (crops grow at the same rate until harvesting.) During growth and especially after harvesting the system is prone to soil erosion from rain. The field requires a hefty input of fertilisers for growth and machinery for harvesting. The work is more likely to be repetitive, mechanised and rely on fossil fuels .

In place of fossil fuel technology permaculture aims to make useful connections between its component parts. It does this by careful observation of how different parts of the system intertact, with an underlying understanding that the subtleties of nature provide models that are more efficient and sustainable than the land use systems we have so far developed. The classic example of useful connections is the chicken greenhouse. By attaching the chickenshed to a green house you can reduce the need to heat the greenhouse by fossil fuels, as the chickens bodies heat the area. The chickens scratching and pecking can be put to good use to clear new land for crops. Their manure can be used to fertilise the soil. Feathers could be used in compost or as a mulch. The chickens have a stress free life (foxes excepted) and produce a surplus of eggs. In a "conventional" factory situation all these chicken outputs are seen as a waste problem. So in the factories are cooled by huge air conditionors, the chicken waste is extracted and seen as a problem. All the energy is focused on egg production. Thus it is a further principle of permaculture that "pollution is energy in the wrong place"

A permaculture design would seek to address a wide range of problems by including its main ethics as an integral part of the final design. Crucially, it would seek to address problems beyond the economic question of how to make money from growing crops. The final design would include this as well as giving equal weight to maintaining ecological balance, making sure that people working on the project's needs were met and that no one was exploited. One way of doing this is through designing a system that has "multiple outputs" For example, a wheat field interspersed with walnuts will reduce soil erosion, act as a windbreak and provide a walnut crop as well as a wheat crop. As there are two crops to manage the work will be more interesting. Here the system comes into conflict with conventional agriculture and economics. By interplanting trees in wheat fields there is a reduction in the wheat yield. The field is also harder to harvest using machinery, as the operator has to drive around the trees. Most farms specilise in one main crop at a time and seek to maximise surplus in order to increase profit. This surplus can only be maintained with a massive injection of fossil fuels. So, as things stand it is quite hard for a permaculture farm to compete with a "conventional " farm in order to grow basic fruit and veg. This does not mean that there is no possibility of making a living from permaculture systems.

A basic principle is to "add value" to existing crops. For example jam is more valuable than strawberries. By doing this and making useful connections, permaculture designs can find niches for themselves in our existing socio-ecomomic structure, but it is unlikely that permaculture designs could produce the flood of fresh produce needed to keep 24 hour hyper markets stocked with goods. Why is this? Perhaps because as systems become more complex the communities of animals and plants are more likely to balance out and massive surpluses of just one crop are harder to arrive at. There is more likely to be a more constant and varied flow of crops over the course of a year. As food has become cheaper it becomes harder to make a living from growing it on a small scale.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For more information -

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SOUTH BAY Gilroy Home Tour. View gardens in four homes at Eagle Ridge. Hosted by the Gilroy Assistance League.

Cayuga Nature Center holds open house today and Sunday (The Ithaca Journal)
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IPG to Add Luxury Hotel to Argentine Wine Resort (Commercial Property News)
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