Like many people, I came to permaculture via a circuitous route. In the early 1990s, my wife and I bought a house tucked into five wooded acres in the Cascade foothills east of Seattle. This being my first adult adventure in rural living, I spent long and happy hours in the public library paging through and dreaming over books on homesteading skills and country living. One of those books, a thick, black one, grabbed my attention. It had the word “permaculture” in the title, and I had no idea what that word meant. I pulled it off the shelf and browsed the table of contents. The subjects leapt out at me — design, nature’s patterns, climate, trees, water, soils, earthworks, economics, community.
These were all topics I had been fascinated with my whole life, but I never saw how they fit together. I just thought I had a weirdly eclectic collection of interests. Wonderfully, permaculture assembled and related them in a way that made sense of my life and of the larger world. Those early permaculture books showed how all these seemingly disparate disciplines connect, mingle, synergize, and tie into an organic whole. The book you hold in your hands does this, too, but in a very different and much deeper way.
The first permaculture books were mostly theory, simply because there was so little permaculture actually on the ground and functioning. But now, permaculture landscapes can be found in more than 150 countries. North America abounds with dozens of mature, beautiful, and ecologically resilient examples of permaculture, and thousands of younger sites and permaculture-related businesses, schools, and nonprofits are popping up everywhere. Jono Neiger has explored many of them, designs them, and has built and lived in several of them, including his present home, Hickory Gardens, in Massachusetts.
This book is a bountiful harvest of the techniques, ideas, strategies, lessons, and wisdom embodied in the very best of permaculture design as practiced today. And although its main focus, like that of permaculture, is on working in ecologically sound ways with the landscape, in these pages you will also learn how permaculture can help meet every human and ecological need: food, water, shelter, energy, community, financial resources, health, and all the rest. Permaculture has burst out of the garden and into the community; The Permaculture Promise shows how that has been done and how you can apply permaculture almost everywhere, too.
Jono is uniquely suited to tell this important and richly faceted story. I met Jono at the very beginning of my permaculture career. He was the land steward and permaculture program director at Lost Valley Educational Center in Dexter, Oregon. I learned much from watching Jono’s careful and sensitive guidance, care, and hard work heal Lost Valley’s badly damaged, brutally clearcut 80-acre site. Now on the faculty at the Conway School and a principal in the firm Regenerative Design Group, Jono shares his wisdom with students and design clients. I’m delighted to see this book, as it brings me up to date on what Jono has learned and done in the years since he left the West Coast, and because it fills an important niche in the permaculture canon.
The Permaculture Promise does that in several important ways. It’s chock-full of examples of permaculture used in landscape design, water conservation, waste treatment, carbon sequestering, community, and economics. The book also gives us clear, well-articulated definitions, concepts, and methods for applying the principles of permaculture, amply illustrated with dozens of captivating images. And best of all, it glows with an optimistic, can-do vision for our future. We are, as Jono writes, in an ecological and social mess, but we have powerful tools for fixing it. Many of them are covered in the pages that follow.
But this book is far more than an instruction manual. The Permaculture Promise is exactly that: a declaration, filled with living proof, of permaculture’s present successes and barely tapped potential for building a resilient, abundance-filled culture that is a joy to live in.
— Toby Hemenway,
author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Permaculture City