What the Heck Is Permaculture?
Permaculture's popping up all over. It's really catching on with young green activists like Juno star Ellen Page, who recently took a break from Hollywood to talk on the Ellen DeGeneres show about her experiences studying permaculture design in an eco-village near Eugene, Oregon.
Teen Hollywood reports that Page "spent a month living on the settlement and learned how to live more simply -- and how valuable urine can be."
Page told Teen Hollywood "It's about living in a holistic way with the earth and reintegrating our lifestyles with the natural cycles ... It was amazing. Anyone at all who has a passion for it can learn about it and use it in their lives in so many different ways ... like peeing in a bucket and using it on your compost. Pee is an excellent source of nitrogen."
But what the heck IS permaculture, besides peeing into a bucket?
Permaculture is an ecological design system based on deep observation of nature, and can be applied to gardens, farms, landscapes, homes and also to "invisible systems" like communities, economies, societies, our psyches and even our spiritual practices. It's a path towards sustainable living that is patterned on the way nature works, and can be applied in rural, suburban and urban areas.
Permaculture was invented in Australia in the 1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and is just now really catching on around the planet. The word "permaculture" is an abbreviation for "permanent agriculture" or "permanent culture."
NaturalNews.com reports that "Permaculture is a way of living; it involves sustainability, ethics, community living, harmony with nature, appropriate technology, organic living, organic farming, etc. It is a way to integrate nature and people in the most sustainable way."
"In permaculture, ethics and design principles are used to help us make good decisions for the people and the environment." NaturalNews also tell us that Permaculture follows three ethics:
Care for the land: Actions to protect the environment and improve it. Earth should be seen as a whole.Care for the people: It involves the physical and psychological aspects, for example providing food and shelter, natural medications, reduce daily hard work, and provide equal opportunities for all people.
Care for the future: It is very important if we want to conserve our resources. Some of the aspects that it involves are recycling, planning, cooperation not competition, supporting local economy, and the use of renewable energy and resources.
My husband and I took the Permaculture Design Course a few years ago and found it incredibly useful and eye-opening. (No peeing in a bucket during our class, though!) What we learned was that the permaculture principles can be applied to every aspect of your daily life as you move towards a happier, more nature-connected and sustainable way of living.
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Here are a few resources for those who would like to learn more about permaculture:
- The Permaculture Institute
- "Greening the Desert:" an amazing video of how permaculturist Geoff Lawton turned pure desert into a lush oasis using permaculture.
- Ellen Page talking about permaculture on Ellen Degeneres.
- "Introduction to Permaculture" by Cathe' Fish is a 6-DVD set of her 2-day workshop with comprehensive, practical information and lavishly-illustrated slideshows. Cathe' covers principles, land, water harvesting, soil, zones, gardens, plants, guilds, bio-remediation, food forests, solar greenhouses, buildings, villages, and more. Available here.
The Yes Men: The Yes Men Fix the World's a Riot. No, Really.
Our new film's story is simple: two guys, armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, infiltrate the world of big business, where we make a lot of bad, powerful people really uncomfortable.
Kerry Trueman: If You Can't Stand The Heat, Get Into The Garden
I'm always amazed by the number of folks who think that Central Park is a natural habitat. In reality, nearly every square inch of the park was painstakingly landscaped in the nineteenth century.
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Yes this was a good article but I wish it would have told the story of the innovations such as bio char, anew sustainable fertilizer, which one table spoon fertilizes 10 acres. The amazing research that the Permaculture Research Institute has networked can be seen on my web site www.ecosutra .com.. The institutes are constantly evolving. The innovation is never ending. Experience Geoff Lawton.
Hello Linda. ThanksI for the permaculture links. I love your Ecotherapy book. I'll be using it in my Environment and Behavior Senior Lab next term. I discussed your book in a talk I gave titled Make Me one with Everything. I talk about Transpersonal Psychology and Ecotherapy as tools for healing the world. Here's the link, if you have time. http://www.drsorah.com/podcast/?p=episode&name=2009-10-08_20091008_01_transpersonal_psychology_1.mp3.
We're in such denial. Your book is the first resource that deals with the feelings that come up when we stop denying. Brilliant.
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I'm so glad to hear that you're finding the Ecotherapy book useful. And thanks for the great link and for helping your students deal with the feelings that come up when we stop denying what's really going on on our planet.
congratulations Linda,
Have you looked into the work of Aussie permaculturalist Darren Doherty, keyline design and the use of the Yeoman plow and its role in carbon sequestration. The dramatic increase in vital topsoil that occurs with this method of farming stores massive amounts of carbon as well as providing a rich soil for all agricultural pursuits. Darren suggests that this alone could do more than reverse global warming due to the percentage or the earth's surface that is under cultivation. I love that permaculture offers guilt-free solutions and optimism!
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Hi Kate,
I love Darren Doherty! Yes, no guilt and positive solutions!
My hubby and I attended a keyline plowing demonstration he did a few months ago. Truly amazing technology.
Also he's coming back to California to teach a class Nov 10 - 15 on Sustainable Land management, broadacre permaculture and keyline design at Orella Ranch. Anyone interested may want to check out http://www.carboneconomysb.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=85:sustainablemanagement&catid=34:courses-category&Itemid=61 for details.
Carbon sequestration in plants and in the soil can be of tremendous help in dealing with global warming. It is the only safe way to sequester soil that has been discovered. In addition to Darren's brilliant work, others are looking into biochar and mimicking the slash and char techniques that were used in the Amazon basin and other regions of Centrla and South America. They also have tremendous potential for capturing carbon and rebuilding soil fertility.
It is estimated that the prairies of North America once had about 15% carbon stored in the topsoil. That is now down to about 3% thanks to destructive agriculture techniques. Keyline and other techniques applied on a mass scale in the prairies alone would significantly slow global warming. If we can get farmland around the world at least up to 10% carbon storage we would feed countless more people while fighting global warming.
He's also teaching a course on soil building and water mgmt in Salinas Valley, CA, November 1-3, alongside Penny Livingston-Stark of the Regenerative Design Institute. I'll be at that one! The implications of the keyline plowing system for carbon capture and rapid soil building are mind-boggling. Anyone interested can catch his talk on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDMg6W95-2s
Keyline design does have so much potential for rehabilitating really large areas, like prairies. A great opportunity for this exists at Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where a keyline presentation will be made from Aug 30-Sept 2, 2010, with instructor Warren Brush, who has accomplished some amazing things with capturing water on his drylands site at Quail Springs, CA. There is a 3000 acre watershed there that is very eroded that is a target, at Slim Buttes, an historic lookout of the Lakota. Pine Ridge has 2 million acres of degraded prairie lands that need rehabilitation. A sustainability school has been started at the reservation that will teach indigenous knowledge of sustainable practices alongside of permaculture and keyline design. A full permaculture course will be held there the last half of August, and we'll be holding a month-long youth apprenticeship there in July which has numerous sustainability elements. Permaculture holds so many brilliantly elegant solutions for virtually any situation. We're also holding a course in Little Haiti in Miami in Jan/Feb - we'll be exploring urban solutions in that course, quite a contrast to the wide open spaces of Lakota lands. Both areas are high poverty, high risk areas with many barriers to sustainability, but permaculture addresses them all by using existing resources to create resilience, self-sufficiency and sustainable economies. Permacultureguild.us
We held our first permaculture course at Pine Ridge in Sept, and it was a beautiful mixture of outside energies (students and funding for the course came from outside the rez) and reservation resources. One principle of permaculture is to create beneficial connection between as many elements in the design area as possible and by doing that, our courses create much more energy and yield than a simple class could do. This is the magic of permaculture, when those beneficial elements connect with each other in sometimes unpredicted ways and the outcome is better than anyone expected. This science needs to get much more mainstream attention - it effectively addresses many cultural and environmental problems. Permacultureguild.us for more info on Lakota and Miami projects.
So exciting to hear permaculture become more mainstream. It's about time that this discipline had a wider audience. I'll be speaking about permaculture this Saturday 9 am at the LA Community Garden conference. There are permaculture design courses on-going in Los Angeles and upcoming in Orange County (www.earthflow.com). Many people are doing "permaculture" without calling it such - check out www.homegrownevolution.com for great information.
A PDC (permaculture design course) taught by qualified teachers is absolutely a game-changer. It transformed how I see the world and gave me much motivation and inspiration for action.
It's not for everyone though. Couch potatoes, whiners, and perpetual victims need not apply!
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Yes, mamabotanica, those who want to stay stuck in bemoaning the problem(s) won't appreciate the practical solutions approach that permaculture offers. It's all about performing green miracles every day!
Thanks, Linda for sharing this news. For those who wish to learn more about Permaculture, I recommend the planet's longest-lived permaculture journal, the Permaculture Activist, which will be 25 years old in 2010. Visit the website at http://www.permacultureactivist.net/ where you will find a Planetary Permaculture Directory, articles, event calendars, plant and seed resource databases, access to design and consulting at http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html, videos, and much more.
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Thanks Keith for mentioning Permaculture Activist -- a fabulous publication, full of great practical and inspiring info and stories!
Permaculture is a game-changer. It's not about CFLs and recycling. It's about recognizing our proper place on Earth, and slowly making our way back to that place. It requires a lot from its practitioners, but returns the investment by an order of magnitude. It's not religious in nature, but its uplifting qualities are unparalleled.
A permacultural world is a world where humans are welcome.
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So true, trippticket. Permaculture is definitely a game-changer and as you point out, one of the best things about it is that in the permaculture view humans are seen as a resource and source of solutions rather than just a scourge upon the planet -- even though it's true that our actions have been and are incredibly destructive right now. What I love about permaculture is the hopefulness of seeing possibilities for people to be a constructive part of nature -- and the practical "how to" information that allows us to be just that.
Fine idea conceptually, but without population control (and long-term reduction) 'twill all be for nought.
But you can reverse that and say without permaculture population control will be for nought. It is not an either or situation. We need a mulit-faceted approach. Actually permaculture can indirectly help with population control There are numerous studies that show when people have food, medical care, eduction and the other necessities covered they have less children. Permaculture can help with food production, housing and other things people need for a decent sustainable life.
The population control meme is faulty. In all developed societies around the world the replacement number is way below par. Instead of increasing world population it has gone down since the mid-seventies. For a comprehensive understanding of population trends i recommend you google NSSM 2000, in which all the statistics are given.
The third Permaculture ethic, as taught by David Holmgren, co-founder of Permaculture, is "Limit reproduction and distribute excess," which is often paraphrased as "Fair share."
I must admit I'm puzzled at the statement, "Instead of increasing world population it has gone down since the mid-seventies." I don't think we're accessing the same data sources, Kaviraj.
Happy to see this on HP! The thing I struggle with the most is trying to do it all at once rather than rationally planning out lawn removal, rainwater catchment, raising our own food. Other things to look up are "urban permaculture" and "urban homesteading", it is so inspiring what people are doing in windowsills, rooftops and parking strips.
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I agree, SageFire. We can't try to do it all at once, but we can get going now. Every constructive action we take contributes to the overall solution.
Also search for "Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way" on your favorite torrent portal. I'm seeding (no pun intended). It's an outstanding documentary that explains how humans can design self-sustaining productive forests that operate on the same symbiotic principles as natural forests.
Good recommendation. Geoff Lawton's video is a must.
Some more resources on food forests:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg_PvqqkOEk
http://permaculture.org.au/2007/03/01/greening-the-desert-now-on-youtube/ Video on Greening the Desert
Very interesting on subject I find endlessly fascinating. What they're doing Oregon sounds very cool but I suggest that you read Charles C. Mann's book "1491; recent revelation on pre-contact America". If you think permaculture is some new wacky approach that is hard for us to get a handle on, imagine what the first europeans thought when they encountered the permaculture practices of the native people in the Americas. Of course europeans saw very little because by the time we came in numbers with literate chroniclers of what was here, the original populations had been reduced to a thin shadow and no longer could hold their culture together, and their gardens looked like wilderness...the pigeons, without natives to harvest them, had a populaton explosion and became billions and billions. Same with the buffalo! Think about the Amazon, it's people now reduced to being illiterate savages without knowledge of their own past and no knowing how to re-establish the vast gardens that we now see as a wilderness untouched by humans, except the stone age savages who hide from us. We should help them return the Amazon and Eastern US Forests to the productive and sustaining gardens they were before European civilization came and failed to recgonize what it is that was here and still fail to see what it is that is missing, hidden, and waiting to be revitalized; reject the monoculture of industrialization.
The problem with Europeans was that they thought they could remake all the lands they "conquered" into the image of Europe, which nine out of ten times simply destroyed the sustainable means of all the natives.
I have objections to the term "savages" and prefer "primitive" as being closer to the primal state in which they live. "Savages" sounds like brutal people, which patently they are not.
No question that many indigenous people, though there are some exceptions, did an excellent job of managing the ecology of the area they lived in. One good example is the management of the landscape by California native peoples. This has been documented in a book by U.C. Davis Professor M. Kat Anderson called "Tending The Wild". When I read that book I was awestruck at the brilliance of their land management techniques and the sophistication of their knowledge of the land they lived in. Their practical knowledge of botany, zoology, and ecology was profound. Most of us who have been trying to live a more sustainable lifestyle are novices compared to the native cultures of old California.
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Indigenous people have so much to teach the rest of us. The founders of permaculture, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, were inspired by the wisdom of the aboriginal people of Australia. Permaculture includes a lot of indigenous wisdom from around the world and it's ironic that now permaculture teachers are often called upon to help people who formerly had that wisdom reclaim it. Including Westerners, of course. Even just a few generations ago, many people had a lot of wisdom about how to live in harmony with nature. We just have to get that back.
If hemp were legal I could drive a diesel truck back and forth between work and the county refinery
to the stores and back and get pellets for the stove and get local food over and over and over.
Yea, it's silly that hemp is illegal in at least one unenlightened country.
But neither does it seem quite right that hemp's advocates claim it will solve all our problems. Hemp can surely fit into Permaculture, but I'd sure hate to see thousand-acre monoculture hemp farms, which in my opinion, would be no better than all the monoculture crops we have today.
There are no silver bullets.
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