Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainabilty

1. Permaculture
Principles & Pathways Beyond
Sustainability

2. 1. Observe & Interact
• The landscape is the textbook
• Failure is useful so long as we learn
• Elegant solutions are simple, even invisible
• Make the smallest intervention necessary
• Avoid too much of a good thing
• The problem is the solution
• Recognize and break out of design cul-de-sacs

3. • “It is as if we are wandering about a landscape
littered with the pieces of many different jigsaw
puzzles. Our task is to pick up as many pieces as
seem possibly useful, limited in the end by how
many we can recognize, and carry them to a place
we don’t yet know, where we must construct a
new jigsaw puzzle from what we have.”
• “…unless we get out there, and open our eyes and
use our hands and our hearts, all the ideas in the
world will not save us.”

4. 2. Catch & Store Energy
• Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
• Poorly used sources of energy include:
– Solar: drying, water heating, passive solar
– Wind: pumping water
– Biomass: sustainable management of trees and forests for fuel and building
materials
– Runoff Water: irrigation, aquaculture

5. • “Maintenance of a seed line by regularly growing
and saving seed is one of the most important
examples of catching and storing energy.”
• “Increasing the humus content of agricultural soil
has always been a principal of organic agriculture.
Changing the management of farmland to use
organic and permaculture strategies and
techniques can rebuild this storage of soil carbon
fertility and water close to those of natural
grasslands and forests. It is arguably the greatest
single contribution we could make to ensure the
future survival of humanity.”

6. 3. Obtain a Yield
• Yields from vegetables can vary as much as two orders
of magnitude depending on fertility
• “If we expose very young children to the delight of
foraging food in a garden, they are more likely to grow
up with a deep and intuitive understanding of our
dependence on nature and its abundance.”
• Many permaculture strategies and techniques generalist
in nature with more flexibility and less emphasis on
efficiency

7. • Numeracy and accounting give measures of
yield
• “Money may not be an adequate measure of
value in accounting, but this should not
detract from the value of accounting itself.
An accountant friend once suggested that
accountants were not really enemies of
sustainability, they just needed to be given
appropriate numbers to add up.”

8. 4. Apply Self Regulation &
Accept Feedback
• Self maintaining and regulating systems
Holy Grail of permaculture
• Traditional social and ethical constraints
• Market and law are main mechanisms for
providing negative feedback
• Personal responsibility

9. • “…self controlling aspects of human
culture, rather than the expansion of
technology for resource exploitation and
growth, represent the highest evolutionary
development achieved by Homo sapiens.
The ways in which we apply these abilities
to controlling the excesses of growth and
expansion over the next century will the
greatest test of our evolutionary
sophistication.”

10. 5. Use & Value Renewable
Resources & Services
• Environmental technology
• Chook tractor
• Trees as renewable energy source:
– Provide wood for wood gas or methanol
– Structural timber products
– Forests produce honey and other products and
services
– Can grow sustainably on poor land

11. • “The image of clean green technology
where we do not need to mess with nature
or kill anything to provide for our needs is,
in the final analysis, an illusion. That
illusion appears to have substance only
because generations of the world’s more
affluent urbanites have been disconnected
from nature.”

12. 6. Produce no Waste
• “Refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle”
• Recycling most generally overemphasized
• Maintenance
• Pest plants and animals as wasted resources

13. • “Governments do not generally support major
social changes away from addictive consumption,
even though the social and environmental benefits
would be great, because the growth economy is
inextricably tied to dysfunctional over-
consumption.”
• “The prevailing response of land managers,
environmentalists and society is to regard
proliferating species as new forms of biological
pollution when they are in reality, unused
resources. Working out more creative and
effective ways to use wild resources is a constant
theme in permaculture design.”

14. 7. Design from Patterns to
Details
• Permaculture zones
• Forests as models for agriculture:
– Dominated by large trees
– Include understory species
– Have diverse habitats for small and large
animals
– Are effective at holding soil

15. • “Complex systems that work tend to evolve
from simple ones that work, so finding the
appropriate pattern for that design is more
important than understanding all the details
of the elements in the system.”
• “The permaculture strategy of tree crops
and food forests is not about creating
massive biomass forests; instead, it focuses
on trees that have the maximum potential to
feed people and livestock.”

16. 8. Integrate Rather than
Segregate
• Each element performs many functions;
each important function is supported by
many elements
• Rebuilding community

17. • “Permaculture can be seen as part of a long
tradition of concepts that emphasize
mutualistic and symbiotic relationships over
competitive and predatory ones. Declining
energy availability will shift the general
perception of these concepts from romantic
idealism to practical necessity.”

18. 9. Use Small & Slow Solutions
• Small scale, minimal movement alternatives:
– Stacking of plants to make use of soil, water, and
light in small areas
– Multipurpose buildings/integrated land uses
– Production of perishable foods from household
gardens
– Local economic systems
– Bicycle transportation

19. • “In simple energetic terms, a given energy
supply can support a large mass moving
slowly, or a small mass moving fast, but not
both. If energy availability rises, systems
can grow in size and increase in speed of
movement. If energy availability
diminishes, systems must shrink, or slow
down, or do both.”

20. 10. Use & Value Diversity
• Number of functional connections, not
species
• We proceed without knowledge when
designing more self-reliant systems:
– No or few local examples
– Inherent complexity and individuality
– Novel factors (new species, knowledge,
technology)
– Natural co-evolutionary forces

21. • “Nature is equally concerned with diversity
and with power and productivity. Teaching
of environmental science and popular
environmental culture tends to ignore this
aspect of nature in an effort to counter the
obsession with the prevailing economic
measures of productivity and power.”

22. 11. Use Edges & Value the
Marginal
• Edge in cultivated landscapes
• Wild foods as marginal systems
• Rundown neighborhoods
• City and hinterland (center and margin)

23. • “Within every terrestrial ecosystem the
living soil – which may only be a few
centimeters deep – is an edge or interface
between non-living material earth and the
atmosphere. For all terrestrial life, including
humanity, this is the most important edge of
all. Deep, well-drained and aerated soil is
like a sponge, a great interface that supports
productive and healthy plant life.”

24. 12. Creatively Use & Respond to
Change
• Ecological models of succession:
– Pulsing models:
• Agricultural: Cell grazing, rotational cropping, slash and burn
– Four-phase model of change:
• Conservation
• Release
• Reorganization
• Exploitation
• Ecosynthesis:
– Evolution of new ecosystems of native and exotic
species responding to novel conditions

25. • “In developing a post-affluent society it is
not necessary to denigrate what our parents,
grandparents or ancestors did as ignorant,
shortsighted, or anti-nature. Instead, we
recognize that the ground on which we
stand has been prepared for us by those who
have gone before.”