What is permaculture?

Whenever someone asked me to explain permaculture, I had a hard time describing it in just a few sentences because it is a lifestyle and a whole system. Most of the time, permaculture is firstly connected to agriculture: a concept developed in the 1970s by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, two environmental designers and ecological educators from Australia. The term ‘permaculture’ contains the two words ‘permanent agriculture’ and is a sustainable and perennial form of agriculture. Later, it came to stand for ‘permanent culture’ because the social aspects were as important as the ecological aspects. Wikipedia introduces permaculture as ‘a system of agricultural and social design principles centered around stimulating or directly utilizing the patterns and features observed in natural ecosystems.’

Another explanation is offered by Katherine Wasser from 1994:

[P]ermaculture has come to mean more than just food-sufficiency in the household. Self-reliance in food is meaningless unless people have access to land, information, and financial resources. So in recent years it has come to encompass appropriate legal and financial strategies, including strategies for land access, business structures, and regional self-financing. This way it is a whole human system.

There are the 12 permaculture principles:

1. Observe and interact
2. Catch and store energy
3. Obtain a yield
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
6. Produce no waste
7. Design from patterns to details
8. Integrate rather than segregate
9. Use small and slow solutions
10. Use and value diversity
11. Use edges and value the marginal
12. Creatively use and respond to change

As you can see, these principles can be interpreted to be applied to many different branches, not just agriculture. I will explain the first one which is also the foundation of permaculture: Observe and interact. Permaculture is about working with and understanding nature, and looking at natural and social patterns. When one changes or adjusts a natural or social pattern, it is important to understand it. When working with land, a permaculture designer observes and records the land over a period of time. This enables him/her to see the relationships and correlations between elements. S/He needs to do draw a base map, watch wildlife that is coming in and out, trees/plants/shrubs, existing structures and resources, observe sectors such as wind, sun, water, noise, microclimate and soil.

This is actually not really unique to permaculture, since many farmers have been practising this approach. Some equal permaculture to organic gardening, but permaculture actually goes even beyond. Permaculture focuses on diversity of produce, imitates nature through inter-planting (rather than food rows) and shaping the garden according to water flow and catchment, holistic management, use of natural energies such as wind, bird droppings, leaves, creating food and habitat for humans and animals, and use of integrated pest management (such as birds, insects, companion planting) and reduction of waste (waste goes back into the cycle).

Another important part of permaculture are its ethics: Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share.

By adopting the ethics and applying these principles in our daily life we can make the transition from being dependent consumers to becoming responsible producers. This journey builds skills and resilience at home and in our local communities that will help us prepare for an uncertain future with less available energy.

The state of the soil is seen as reflecting the health and well-being of society. Earth Care means caring for the soil. To see how healthy the soil is, one looks at how much life there exists. It is estimated that between 50,000 to 1 million of species, mostly microbes, live in one gram of soil. All life forms should be respected and should not be eliminated just because they don’t have a ‘human value’. People Care represents the need for collaboration and dependence between people to affect change.

The challenge is to grow through self-reliance and personal responsibility. Self-reliance becomes more feasible when we focus on non-material well-being, taking care of ourselves and others without producing or consuming unnecessary material resources.

Fair Share is taking/consuming only what one needs and to distribute and share any abundance to the community. Increased human consumption has put our interest on top of not only other species such as animals and insects, but also on top of other human beings.

There are some criticisms of course. It is argued that many indigenous farmers have been working like this for many decades whereas permaculture often seems to be referred as a new ‘invention’ by some Australian guys. Then there is also the vibe of elitism and privilege to it: Who has time to ‘let nature do its thing’ when you need to feed your family immediately or don’t even own land? The permaculture movement has often been criticised for its racial homogeneity. In an article called ‘Decolonizing permaculture’, the author, who describes himself as white cis-male, asks himself how he, as part of the permaculture movement in North America, could be more relevant to communities of colour. Rather than using recruitment, tokenism or green missionary work, it is more important to him to be an ally to marginalized First Nations people. That includes giving back land that was stolen from Native communities and decolonizing one’s own mind.

He writes about permaculture and its danger of being ‘inadvertent colonial appropriation’:

In this case, settler peoples are studying and applying indigenous forms of land management, which can be positive as long as the tools and techniques are willingly shared by the indigenous peoples and not brashly stolen, like they have been so many other times throughout history.

Permaculture is more than just Earth Care, a 'true' permaculturist places equal importance on People Care and Fair Share: Permaculture is a movement for social justice.

Sources:

http://www.permaculture.net/about/brief_introduction.html

https://permacultureprinciples.com

http://www.permaculturevisions.com/difference-between-organic-gardening-and-permaculture/

http://en.wikipedia.org/Permaculture

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Permaculture_Design/

https://www.permaculture.org.uk/principle/1-observe-and-interact

http://www.sustainablebynature.com/blog/2016/9/1/permaculture-principle-1-observe-and-interact

https://modernfarmer.com/2016/04/permaculture/

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/decolonizing-permaculture/