Permaculture: You’ve Heard of It, But What the Heck Is
It?
According to an article of BRIAN BARTH, 2016 Bill Mollison, the Tasmanian son
of a fisherman who first coined the term 1978, defined “permaculture” as:
“The conscious
design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the
diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the
harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food,
energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable
way.”
Is permaculture a gardening technique or a special approach to farming,
like biodynamics? Is it some type of back-to-the-land, off-the-grid
intentional community? Is it about sustainable architecture, aquaponics,
philosophy, horticulture, design? Permaculture is all that and then some, which
is why it’s so hard for anyone to capture what it means in one neat sentence.
In other words, permaculture is a
holistic, living-in-harmony-with-nature worldview, as well as technical
approach for how to do so.
Mollison eventually became a professor of biogeography and environmental
psychology at the University of Tasmania, where he met David Holmgren, a
graduate student at the time, who helped him develop the principles and
practices that are now taught around the world in the
standard Permaculture Design Course, typically a two-week immersive
experience held on a farm or property that has been developed with a
permaculture approach. The word permaculture
is intended as a contraction of permanent and agriculture,
which, as Holmgren notes, has been expanded to
include culture in addition to just agriculture. The root word
“permanent” is intended as a reference to sustainability – an unsustainable
society would, by definition, eventually cease to exist; it would be
impermanent. Practitioners are known as “permaculturists” or “permies.”
Mollison wrote a number of books over the years, including the
hefty Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, which is the bible for the
movement. He also starred in Global Gardener, a docu-series made for
Australian public television in the early nineties, which is now a cult
classic available free online.
The proof of permaculture’s influence in the mainstream is everywhere.
None of that has stopped permaculture from being highly influential in the
discourse of sustainable agriculture and green lifestyles. Though permaculture
has largely been an underground social movement, its ideals and concepts have
bubbled up in the mainstream more and more. I was a die-hard devotee in my
early twenties, eventually earning my Permaculture Teacher’s Certificate and
offering courses on everything from designing food forests to building
bio-swales on the farm in California.
The proof of permaculture’s influence in the mainstream is everywhere: its
basic tenets are embedded in every idea about sustainability that blares from
the television or the menu of a farm-to-table restaurant. Here are five of its more well-known principles to help you
understand what permaculture is all about.
Closed Loop Systems
Any system that provides for its own energy needs is inherently sustainable.
This concept can be extended beyond things like biofuels and solar power to
what permaculturists call “inputs,” like food and fertilizer. For example,
rather than importing fertilizer to a farm or garden, the system could be
designed to provide for its own fertility needs – perhaps from livestock manure
or cover crops. And if you’re raising livestock, you should certainly aspire to
provide all the food for your animals from on-site, whether raising grain,
forage crops, or recycling kitchen waste as animal feed. Any permaculturist
worth their salt would remind you that a successful closed loop
system “turns waste into resources” and “problems into solutions.” “You
don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency,” Mollison was fond of
saying, which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen how gleefully ducks wolf
down snails.
Perennial Crops
Permies aren’t the only ones to recognize that tilling the ground once or twice
a year isn’t particularly good for the soil. Which is why they
advocate using perennial crops that are planted just once, rather than annual
crops which require constant tillage. Agroforestry, the cultivation of edible
tree crops and associated understory plants, is emphasized – think shade-grown
coffee or cacao plantations in South America. The only problem is that few
crops that most of us eat are perennials; but there is no doubt that if we
could replace all the monocultures of corn, soy, and wheat in the world with
agroforestry systems (while still feeding the world), agriculture which be much
more sustainable.
Multiple Functions
One of the more original ideas of permaculture is that every component of a
structure or a landscape should fulfill more than one function. The idea
is to create an integrated, self-sufficient system through the strategic design
and placement of its components. For example, if you need a fence to contain
animals, you might design it so that it also functions as a windbreak, a
trellis, and a reflective surface to direct extra heat and light to nearby
plants. A rain barrel might be used to raise aquatic food plants and edible
fish, in addition to providing water for irrigation. Permies call this
“stacking functions.”
Eco-Earthworks
Water conservation is a major focus on permaculture farms and gardens, where
the earth is often carefully sculpted to direct every last drop of rain toward
some useful purpose. This may take the form of terraces on steep
land; swales on moderately sloped land (which are broad, shallow
ditches intended to capture runoff and cause it to soak into the ground around
plantings); or a system of canals and planting berms on low swampy ground. The
latter is modeled on the chinampasof the ancient Aztecs, an approach to
growing food, fish, and other crops in an integrated system, often heralded by
permaculturists as the most productive and sustainable form of agriculture ever
devised.
Let Nature Do the Work for You
The permaculture creed is perhaps best captured in the Mollisonian mantras of
“working with, rather than against, nature” and of engaging in “protracted and
thoughtful observation, rather than protracted and thoughtless labor.” On a
practical basis, these ideas are carried out with things like chicken
tractors, where the natural scratching and bug-hunting behavior of hens is
harnessed to clear an area of pests and weeds in preparation for planting – or
simply planting mashua under your locust trees. Locust trees are
known for adding nitrogen to the soil, while mashua, a vining, shade tolerant
root crop from the Andes, needs a support structure to grow on. Thus, the
natural attributes of the locust eliminate the need to bother with fertilizer
or building a trellis, while providing shade, serving as a nectar source for
bees and looking pretty. By letting nature do the work of farming and gardening
for you, one achieves another of Mollison’s famous maxims: “maximizing
hammock time.”
