The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.
We know how to solve every food, clean energy, and sensible shelter problem in every climate; we have already invented and tested every necessary technique and technical device, and have access to all the biological material that we could ever use.
The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy, and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
~ Bill Mollison Permaculture Institute Tasmania
Permaculture design principles extend from the position that “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children” (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements – ones that reduce society’s reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth’s ecosystems.
While originating as an agro-ecological design theory, permaculture has developed a large international following of individuals who have received training through intensive two week long ‘permaculture design courses’. This ‘permaculture community’ continues to expand on the original teachings of Mollison and his associates, integrating a range of alternative cultural ideas, through a network of training, publications, permaculture gardens, and internet
forums. In this way permaculture has become both a design system as well as a loosely defined philosophy or lifestyle ethic.
Read more about Permaculture
Feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish,
Feed him for a lifetime.
Teach a man permaculture, He will raise his own fish,
thus feed himself, his family, and his descendents unto the 7th generation.
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