Courtesy : en.wikipedia.org
Permaculture
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from “permanent agriculture”, but was later adjusted to mean “permanent culture”, incorporating social aspects. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to modern industrialized methods instead adopting a more traditional or “natural” approach to agriculture.
Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management, sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.
Permaculture uses creative design processes based on whole-systems thinking, considering all materials and energies in flow that affect or are affected by proposed changes. In practical terms it means that before, for example, modifying overland water flow, one fully considers both upstream and downstream effects in the short and long terms. Or, when looking at a “problem”, such as brushy vegetation, one considers how removing or altering it will affect soil and wildlife, and how these interacting forces would evolve over time and space.
History
Bill Mollison, who has been described as the “father of permaculture,” cites Aboriginal Tasmanian belief systems as an inspiration of the practice.
In 1929, Joseph Russell Smith appended King’s antecedent term as the subtitle for Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, which he wrote in response to widespread deforestation, plow agriculture, and erosion in the eastern mountains and hill regions of the USA. He proposed the planting of tree fruits and nuts as human and animal food crops that could stabilize watersheds and restore soil health.Smith saw the world as an inter-related whole and suggested mixed systems of trees with understory crops. This book inspired individuals such as Toyohiko Kagawa who pioneered forest farming in Japan in the 1930s. Tanaka in turn inspired the agricultural extension agent, Masanobu Fukuoka, whose later writings on natural farming influenced the growth of the permaculture movement.
George Washington Carver developed what can now be called permaculture practices, the rotation of particular crops to restore nitrogen to the soil and repair damaged Southern farm land, in his work at Tuskegee Institute, beginning 1896 until his death in 1947.
In his 1964 book Water for Every Farm, the Australian agronomist and engineer P. A. Yeomans advanced a definition of permanent agriculture as one that can be sustained indefinitely. Yeomans introduced both an observation-based approach to land use in Australia in the 1940s and in the 1950s the Keyline Design as a way of managing the supply and distribution of water in semi-arid regions. Other early influences include Stewart Brand’s works, Ruth Stout and Esther Deans, who pioneered no-dig gardening, and Masanobu Fukuoka who, in the late 1930s in Japan, began advocating no-till orchards and gardens and natural farming.
In the late 1960s, Bill Mollison, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Tasmania, and David Holmgren, graduate student at the then Tasmanian College of Advanced Education started developing ideas about stable agricultural systems on the southern Australian island of Tasmania. Their recognition of the unsustainable nature of modern industrialized methods and their inspiration from Tasmanian Aboriginal and other traditional practises were critical to their formulation of permaculture. In their view, industrialized methods were highly dependent on non-renewable resources, and were additionally poisoning land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tons of topsoil from previously fertile landscapes. They responded with permaculture. This term was first made public with the publication of their 1978 book Permaculture One.
Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.
— Bill Mollison
Following the publication of Permaculture One, Mollison responded to widespread enthusiasm for the work by traveling and teaching a three-week program that became known as the Permaculture Design Course. It addressed the application of permaculture design to growing in major climatic and soil conditions, to the use of renewable energy and natural building methods, and to “invisible structures” of human society. He found ready audiences in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Britain, and Europe, and from 1985 also reached the Indian subcontinent and southern Africa. Students of Mollison’s Permaculture Design Course (PDC) included Max Lindegger, Lea Harrison, Robyn Francis, and Geoff Lawton in Australia, Tom Ward, Dave Jacke, Michael Pilarski, and Dan Hemenway in the USA, Andrew Langford in Britain, and Declan Kennedy and Margrit Kennedy in Europe. By the early 1980s, the concept had broadened from agricultural systems towards sustainable human habitats and at the 1st Intl. Permaculture Convergence, a gathering of graduates of the PDC held in Australia, the curriculum was formalized and its format shortened to two weeks. After Permaculture One, Mollison further refined and developed the ideas while designing hundreds of properties. This led to the 1988 publication of his global reference work, Permaculture: A Designers Manual. Mollison lectured in over 80 countries and taught the PDC to hundreds of students. Mollison encouraged graduates to become teachers and set up their own institutes and demonstration sites.Critics suggest that this success weakened permaculture’s social aspirations of moving away from industrial social forms. They argue that the self-help model (akin to franchising) has had the effect of creating market-focused social relationships that the originators initially opposed.
In the 1990s, the permaculture movement spread throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In Hong Kong, the Asian Institute of Sustainable Architecture (AISA) was established. The Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute (IMAP) flourished in Guatemala. The Permaculture Institute of El Salvador is another example.
Foundational ethics
The ethics on which permaculture builds are:
- “Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply”.
- “Care of people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence”
- “Setting limits to population and consumption: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles” Mollison
Mollison’s 1988 formulation of the third ethic was restated by Holmgren in 2002 as “Set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus” and is elsewhere condensed to “share the surplus”.
Permaculture emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It determines where these elements should be placed so they can provide maximum benefit to the local environment. Permaculture maximizes useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on individual elements, but rather on the relationships among them. Properly done, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input and maximize benefits through synergy.
Permaculture design is founded in replicating or imitating natural patterns found in ecosystems because these solutions have emerged through evolution over thousands of years and have proven to be effective. As a result, the implementation of permaculture design will vary widely depending on the region of the Earth it is located in. Because permaculture’s implementation is so localized and place specific, scientific literature for the field is lacking or not always applicable. Design principles derive from the science of systems ecology and the study of pre-industrial examples of sustainable land use.Permaculture draws from disciplines including organic farming, agroforestry, integrated farming, sustainable development, physics, meteorology, sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, engineering, and applied ecology.
Theory
Design principles
The viewpoint of a chicken through the eyes of permaculture design
Holmgren articulated twelve permaculture design principles in his Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability:
- Observe and interact: Take time to engage with nature to design solutions that suit a particular situation.
- Catch and store energy: Develop systems that collect resources at peak abundance for use in times of need.
- Obtain a yield: Emphasize projects that generate meaningful rewards.
- Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: Discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems function well.
- Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature’s abundance: reduce consumption and dependence on non-renewable resources.
- Produce no waste: Value and employ all available resources: waste nothing.
- Design from patterns to details: Observe patterns in nature and society and use them to inform designs, later adding details.
- Integrate rather than segregate: Proper designs allow relationships to develop between design elements, allowing them to work together to support each other.
- Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain, make better use of local resources, and produce more sustainable outcomes.
- Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces system-level vulnerability to threats and fully exploits its environment.
- Use edges and value the marginal: The border between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the system’s most valuable, diverse, and productive elements.
- Creatively use and respond to change: A positive impact on inevitable change comes from careful observation, followed by well-timed intervention.
