Permaculture

= a design science for developing sustainable human habitats through seeking synergy with natures own processes and cycles.

Description

"Permaculture is a set of principles and practices that draw upon patterns found in healthy ecosystems to design more sustainable human and natural systems. These principles can be applied to any endeavor but are most commonly used in gardening, organic agriculture, landscape design, natural building techniques and environmental protection initiatives.

The movement traces its origins to the Australian island of Tasmania in the 1970s when naturalists Billl Mollison and David Holmgren grew concerned about problems associated with industrial agriculture. Mollison wrote several books outlining what a more ecological approach to growing food, protecting landscapes and managing economies would look like, and lectured in more than 80 countries. It is now being practiced by households and communities around the world." (http://onthecommons.org/magazine/permaculture-revolution-takes-root-cities)

Principles

From the Wikipedia:

"What sets permaculture apart from other developmental approaches is that it is not just a model, it is a comprehensive design process. Each site, whether a household, school, clinic, business, farm, or village, has a unique set of elements and design considerations. But while each site is viewed as unique, in permaculture design and practice, economic benefit does not contradict, or even benefit to, three core values or ethics:

1. Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
2. Care of People: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
3. Setting Limits to Population and Consumption: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Core_values)

From URL = http://www.heathcote.org/PCIntro/4Principles.htm

   * conservation
   * stacking functions
   * repeating functions
   * reciprocity
   * appropriate scale
   * diversity
   * give away the surplus

Permaculture Design Principles

URL = http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php

   * observe and interact
   * catch and store energy
   * obtain a yield
   * apply self-regulation and accept feedback
   * use and value renewable resources and sources
   * produce no waste
   * design from patterns to details
   * integrate rather than segregate
   * use small and slow solutions
   * use and value diversity
   * use edges and value the marginal
   * creatively use and respond to change

Discussion

A Cultural Critique of the Primitivist Wing of Permaculture

Eric Hunting:

"Permaculture is a valuable and practical technology whose inspiration probably has its roots (pun intended...) in Taoist gardening and cultures like that of the Chagga tribes of the south-eastern slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro where, until recent times, the purposeful concerted co- cultivation of nearly a thousand plant species was employed to create one of the most remarkable agrarian cultures ever seen. Communities that look like natural jungle but host 100,000 people in comfort. Permaculture is, essentially, the _engineering_ of artificial ecosystems for the purpose of maximizing productivity for a diversity of food crops. It's one of those brilliant 'lazy like an engineer' concepts where one is trying to create a self-perpetuating system for one's own benefit that you need put the least amount of human effort into maintaining. It has its counterpart in polyspecies mariculture which is, again, an attempt to cultivate a self-perpetuating ecosystem that maximizes the production of a number of marine crops starting with algea at the bottom of the food chain -in this way eliminating the economic overhead of feedstocks. It's particularly important to maximizing the economic and carbon replacement potential of the use of OTEC power, exploiting the nutrient-rich upwelling discharge from these systems as the base feedstock. And it's efficient. Polyspecies mariculture can potentially yield about 5 times the protein per hectare of any conventional form of land farming.

The thing with Mollison and other later members of the permaculture movement is that they came out of the 1970s era split in the original environmentalism movement between EcoTech and Soft Tech that resulted from the emergence of an environmental fundamentalism with its origins in 18th century Romanticism and with much influence from neopaganism. Part of this has been the drafting of an arbitrary distinction between 'technology' and other kinds of artifice in the manner of the distinction between the secular and the religious, the former being characterized as profane, the latter virtuous. This relates to the Romanticists rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment in favor of the spiritual, emotional, and presumably more 'human' and 'natural'. And so it becomes 'blasphemous' to consider permaculture or other forms of Soft Tech (a term environmentalists won't even use anymore) a technology with both constructive and destructive potential like any other technology because if its non-electric/electronic, non- mechanical, primitive-seeming, and involves getting your hands dirty and being in intimate contact with trees and plants then it somehow means its more in-tune with the Gaian Logos.

There's no reason to this. There's no reason why biophysics should somehow be more virtuous than any other aspect of physics. But this isn't about reason. It's religion. Progress in permaculture has generally been slowed by this. To be effective at permaculture means to be a scientist and engineer with a deep comprehension of biology and the ecological relationships between organisms. But this cultural rejection of science and 'naughty technology' among so many of the proponents of permaculture -this nonsense that it represents a moral rather than practical alternative to agriculture- results in it not getting the benefit of serious scientific research and thus never being refined as a technique to be broadly implemented. This may be changing with the emergence of the new Bright Green movement -a resurgence of the EcoTech side of environmentalism coming in reaction to the increasing plain deterioration of environmental fundamentalism into a Malthusianist doomsday cult." (http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/aca9bbb8734cb34a/db289de4a5b35a59?show_docid=db289de4a5b35a59)

More Information

1. Description on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
2. Permaculture design wiki http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Permaculture_design
3. Permaculture Blog with lots of interesting articles http://permaculture.org.au/

See also: Open Source Permaculture