Here’s the tough news: We live in a time of dramatic change and uncertainty. As human society reaches out to dominate every corner of the planet, ecosystems are fraying and natural resources are being consumed at an alarming rate. Climate instability and peak oil (the point at which the rate of global oil extraction peaks, thereafter dropping into decline) are inescapable realities. And all the while, the world’s population continues to grow.
With such changes happening all around us,it’s easy to feel like the world is out of control. It’s easy to become cynical or to feel powerless. After all, each of us is just one person, a tiny speck in the seething mass of seven billion people on this planet. What could we, in our small way, ever hope to do to make things better?
The truth is, the only reality we can affect is our own — the immediate life we live each day. And for us, as humans, through all the great arc of our time on this planet, “reality” has been the sum of our relationships: to each other, to the world around us, and to that ineffable spark of life that innervates each of us. The human need for relationships rises in us and feeds us, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Yet modern life has a way of eating away at the relationships that support us. As we become more interconnected in the digital world, we seem to lose connections in the physical world; our social and emotional bonds become more fragmented, and we lose touch with our neighbors and community. As we move away from the land, we neglect the ecological and agricultural systems that feed and shelter us, and those systems become more tenuous. As we begin to take for granted the energy, transportation, and distribution networks that support us, our understanding of these systems diminishes, and we begin to lose our sense of place as citizens and caretakers of a global world.
In this time of disconnect — of peak oil, climate chaos, population explosion, energy crisis, water shortages, mass extinctions, societal disruption — many people are wondering how to get from where we are to where we need to be in order to survive and thrive on this planet. The answer, I think, lies in building relationships. If we can build — or rebuild — connections to each other, to the land, and to the systems that support us, we can, perhaps, contribute to a growing worldwide web of interrelationships. That network, in turn, can become the foundation for a self-sustaining community that interweaves human endeavor with natural systems to support a resilient, prosperous future for all.
That’s what this book is meant to provide: a perspective for navigating our future with grace and a long-term view, including some practical ideas for re-skilling, reconnecting, reengaging, and ultimately creating a more livable world for us all.
That is, in essence, the promise of permaculture.
If we can build — or rebuild — connections to each other, to the land, and to the systems that support us, we can, perhaps, contribute to a growing worldwide web of interrelationships.
Restoring forests (such as this one in western New Zealand) sequesters carbon and creates habitat for native species.
A rice paddy in Vietnam provides dual crops: rice and fish.
Capturing rainwater for garden irrigation makes good use of a scarce resource.
The term “permaculture” was originally coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in their book Permaculture One (1978) as a contraction of “permanent” and “agriculture.” Its etymology reflects the early concept of permaculture as primarily focused on agriculture. By the early 1980s, the definition had expanded in scope to broadly encompass the ways in which people can live on the land and in communities. Now, there are as many definitions of permaculture as there are permaculture designers — it’s like a language, in the sense that it’s constantly evolving as people participate in and contribute to it.
Permaculture: A way for humans to consciously design systems that support ourselves — food production, energy, buildings, transportation, technology, even human relationships and financial systems — while acknowledging our roles as equal, co-creative members of natural ecosystems with the ability to regenerate our environment while we’re providing for our own needs.
Permaculture focuses on mimicking the patterns and relationships found in nature. As we align our human society to match the way a whole, integrated ecosystem operates, we can’t help but become healthy individuals within richly diverse communities. After all, the natural world around us is embedded with knowledge from millennia of trial and error. Unworkable and inefficient designs have largely been culled out, leaving only those that function as efficient, effective long-term systems.
Permaculture uses a whole-systems approach to design. A whole system, by definition, comprises all the parts and factors that contribute to the system’s dynamic self-sufficiency and function. For example, when all the pieces of an ecosystem are functioning together and are mutually supporting, energy cycles efficiently and effectively; the living tissue of plants keeps carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere; water is collected and recharges local aquifers; and microbes, animals, and plants thrive and prosper.
Landscapes, communities, even organizations are like natural ecosystems — the more they’re interconnected and diverse as a whole, the healthier and more resilient they become, and the less waste they generate. In fact, there really is no such thing as waste in nature; there are only resources moving from one place to another.
An efficient and well-functioning ecosystem cycles resources constantly. Yields from one part of the ecosystem provide for the needs of another part. In the same way, a brewery that yields spent grains can provide them to a mushroom cultivation or compost production operation, thus cycling the material and turning it into a benefit for the other business. The benefits are not just reduced waste and healthier food, air, water, and soil but also opportunities for both businesses to cut costs and support the local economy.
At home, whole-system design considers all the connections between the house and the landscape, as well as how water moves through the land and the ways in which it can be stored and used for irrigation, how people move from one part of the landscape to another, energy systems, food production zones, and areas intended for gatherings or for use as sanctuary. All these purposes interconnect, and when considered as a whole, they can be woven together to make an efficient, hospitable, serenely functioning system. If poorly planned, however, the different parts can feel disjointed and require more energy and maintenance.
A decision as simple as where to site a garden or plant fruit trees involves whole-system thinking. If placed farther away from the house, the garden may get less care and may be more prone to deer or rabbit browsing.
Just bringing a garden closer to the home and making it a central aspect of an outdoor living space can make it easier to tend and better utilized. Locating it in an area that has well-drained, fertile soil is clearly a good idea. Going a step further and incorporating the rainwater runoff from the roof and the graywater from the house (that is, wastewater from doing dishes and laundry) — not to mention a composting system for kitchen waste — would create a system that is even more resilient and self-sufficient.
Permaculture offers practical skills and solutions we can use to make the world more whole. It’s a way for us to find our way back into a positive, life-affirming relationship with the planet that sustains us. And it starts small. Growing vegetables in your garden will feed you, lower your monthly food bill, and perhaps offer more nutrition than anything you would get in the grocery store, but it also gets you outside, in the garden, hearing, smelling, and seeing the daily activity and seasonal changes around you. When you think of gardening from this big-picture point of view — from a whole-system perspective — you come to realize just how much it feeds you, both physically and spiritually. It builds upon and nurtures our relationship and communion with the world, allowing us to provide for ourselves while acting as co-creative members of a larger system.
Growing tilapia and vegetables together in an indoor aquaponics system such as this is one way to make our food supply more resilient. It also “closes the waste loop”; the fish waste from the barrels fertilizes the growing vegetables.
Resilience is the ability to adapt to and bounce back from disturbances. Resilient people, communities, land, and ecosystems are able to continue functioning during and after difficult conditions. There is no way to know what the future holds for us, especially when it comes to climate change. In fact, “climate change” might be more fittingly called climate chaos; the climate is becoming very erratic, oscillating widely between hot and cold, dry and wet. According to scientists around the world, the fluctuations that we’re experiencing now — including drought, flooding, extreme heat, extreme cold, and intense storm cycles — are a harbinger of the future. In order to get through the difficult times to come, we need to cultivate the ability to adapt to change, to anticipate and account for these fluctuations, and to design resilience into our systems.
Like a building that has been designed and built to move and flex with hurricane winds, a garden that grows a diversity of crops can handle a few pests and still yield well. Better yet, if the plants are healthy and strong and the garden includes plants that actually repel pests, perhaps the pests just pass by. On a larger scale, an uncertain future will necessitate that we rethink our current industrial food-production system and rebuild our local systems of processing and distributing food, energy, and materials. In this way, we support diversity in our infrastructure and resources while allowing smaller regional systems to adapt to local conditions and requirements. At the same time, we can rebuild the social capital that binds together and supports our communities.
Permaculture is “positivist,” which means that we can acknowledge the difficult realities of the world, but it is important to focus on what we can do, not what we can’t do. We keep our eye on what is good and possible, avoiding the cynicism and negativity that are so easy to slip into. This positivist mind-set provides us the incentive to make a difference rather than despair about those things we can’t control. Can we change our lives and begin to live as part of the ecosystem around us? Can every action we take, every building we build, every crop we grow, and every human relationship we develop help make the world a better place? This is the vision of permaculture: creating a world that we engage with and improve as we live, work, and play.
As a keystone species — one that has taken control over vast areas of the planet — we need to become better caretakers, to see ourselves as part of nature, not above it. By examining our lives through a permaculture lens, in everything from how we grow food and create built environments to how we care for each other, we can help make the world a better place.
Unlike traditional farms that till up the soil each season, “no-till” farms such as this one plant directly into the previous year’s crop residue without turning the soil. The no-till method maintains soil structure, prevents erosion, and decreases the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.
Living systems are regenerative; that is, they renew themselves. The materials and energy that drive all the growth, interactions, production, and decay in a living system are cycled through that system again and again, whether quickly (over the course of a growing season) or slowly (through the geologic ages of the planet). But when those materials and energy are subtracted from a living system — like fossil fuels being extracted, or nutrients being washed away, or a major species being eliminated — the system’s ability to regenerate suffers a blow. With enough damage, the system loses the ability to regenerate entirely, and a cascade of environmental “crashes” follows.
We’re facing a cascade of environmental crashes right now. Living systems across the planet are failing: desertification (the creation of new deserts from previously fertile land) is on the rise, dead zones in the oceans are growing, topsoil is increasingly absent or depleted, major species everywhere are lapsing into extinction. But permaculture offers one simple principle to combat the entire onslaught of disaster: Support nature’s ability to regenerate.
Happily for us, supporting nature’s ability to regenerate itself is also one of the best ways to make the land more productive, stable, and generally conducive to supporting humankind. When we actively participate in and help create regenerative systems (or help repair damaged ones), we can provide for our needs in ways that restore the earth and build its capacity to hold more life. Creating and supporting regenerative systems means moving beyond “sustainability” and actually giving back to the ecosystem around us as we take care of our own needs.
Communities need regenerative work as well. People need connection, to each other and to nature. Reinvesting in communities and rebuilding social networks and social capital bring multiple benefits, like improved education, better health through cleaner water and air, and strengthened connections between elder and younger generations so that, over time, a community holds together and renews itself. In many ways, community regeneration is harder than planting a garden, but the yields can be greater.
Ethics are guideposts for what you might call “right action.” Over time, societies develop these guideposts to help people live in alignment with their values. Permaculture has its own set of ethics, and they are threefold: earth care, people care, and fair share. The first two are probably self-explanatory. The principle of “fair share” simply refers to recognizing the limits of what we need and not consuming more than is necessary, so that we can allow the excess to flow to others who are in need.
These ethics help us regulate our own self-interest and identify when our actions have strayed from the “right” path. For example, if a farm’s practices result in contamination of nearby waterways with animal manure, if the farm’s workers can’t afford housing or food, or if the farm’s surplus isn’t being shared, it becomes clear that there is a disconnect at some point in the system, because permaculture ethics aren’t being followed.
Care for the earth: Don’t allow nutrient runoff to pollute local waterways.
Care for people: Pay a living wage so that people can take care of their families’ needs.
Fair share: Allow neighbors in need or community-supported agriculture (CSA) members to harvest surplus or “seconds” crops.
With these three ethical principles as a foundation for planning and design, permaculture can guide us in our work so that we are always aimed toward right action.
In permaculture, ethics and design principles guide the activity in all areas of our lives
“A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”
—Albert Schweitzer
Permaculture is really nothing new. Many of the principles and practices of permaculture have been known and used by peoples in different settings, climates, and cultures around the world for millennia. For their own preservation, indigenous societies historically developed practices to live more in tune with nature and within the limits of their local ecosystem.
The indigenous philosophy is one that proponents of permaculture now strive toward. But most of us have come far from our own indigenous roots; as newcomers to the land, we will need time to “become native” — time to gain experience on the land and learn to work within its patterns and limits.
The Woodbine Ecology Center in Littleton, Colorado, has laid out five principles defining indigenous permaculture. They are:
As an example, consider the traditional Vietnamese “VAC” — an acronym for the Vietnamese words for garden, fishpond, and animal sheds. This integrated home garden exemplifies the manner in which many native peoples came to actively manage their environment to benefit local ecosystems while providing for their own needs. In a VAC, waste from animals feeds fish, the pond water fertilizes and irrigates the gardens, and overlapping layers of productive vegetation yield vegetables, fruit, and herbs. A VAC can provide for the majority of a family’s needs, and the surplus sold at local markets might provide substantial income. At the same time, a VAC is home to an incredible diversity of flora and fauna and efficiently cycles energy, water, and organic matter in a mostly closed-loop system. VAC gardens can still be found throughout Vietnam today. Some of these gardens are three hundred years old and still producing food! Grounded in ecological principles established over centuries of experience, they serve as inspiration for those of us who, looking ahead to an uncertain future, hope to build upon the past.
