What is Permaculture?

The historical meaning: a regenerative agriculture
 
Permaculture is a word coined in the late 70's by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, 2 ecologists from Tasmania. At the beginning, it meant to mean "permanent culture", that is to say a way of cultivation based on perennial plants (as opposed to conventional agriculture principally based on yearly crops, although permaculture certainly does not exclude them either), but also permanent in the sense "sustainable".
Actually, it also could have been called "regenerative agriculture", because it does not only want to be "sustainable", but to enrich itself year after year. It takes a lot of principles from ecological regeneration. This means that this type of cultivation regenerates the soil (feed with mulch, never leaving it bare and touched by the sun with constant cover... the energy of the sun, our only source of energy on the planet, is never wasted!) instead of degrading it (death of the soil's life forms by plowing it and leaving it bare, using fertilizers, etc. eventually leading to soil depletion, salt crusting and soil erosion -> death of agriculture -> death of our civilization).

This concept has been developed on several observations that they saw in the 70s, but most people are only starting to see now:

• Conventional agriculture and society is highly dependent on oil, a non renewable resource, so we have to learn as soon as possible to live without it, and use it in an intelligent way. 
• Conventional agriculture is very "intensive", but this is very debatable. In terms of production per farmer, it sure is (1 farmer for several thousand acres!!). But in terms of production per amount of energy put into the system, it is not doing so well: it requires about 10 calories of fuel to produce 1 calorie of food (whereas in traditional farming 1 calorie of human/animal force gives 10 calories of food). Even in terms of production per surface it is terrible: we all know that the more diversity you have on 1 acre for example, perhaps the productivity per specie will be lower, but the overall production will be higher! So highly mechanized mono-culture is actually very inefficient! (Source for French speaking people)
• and all the problems everybody points out about our very individualistic and consuming society leading to social, health and environmental problems.

Permaculture's key concept: design

Ok, so we say our conventional monoculture is not ideal... so does that mean we have to go back to traditional farming? When life was so hard and everybody had to work in the fields all day? This is what a lot of people think we're saying... but we say that not all traditional farming were sustainable, nor could they apply to current values and standards.

What permaculture proposes is to increase energy efficiency and reduce human labor by design.

But what is good design? Well Bill Molison and David Holmgren have thought about it, have observed the Tasmanian aborigines' way of living, completely adapted to their environment, have read about Fukuoka's "Natural Farming", and lots of other studies to draw out certain design principles.
Permaculture Design is to place the elements of the system such as to maximize beneficial relationships.

That's nice. But what does it mean?... Well you can take your farm to be your system, for example. You grow vegetables, and you realize that garlic and onions grow better in strawberries, so you start cultivating them together. And there are loads of such examples, things we don't always understand, and things we haven't even discovered yet! And it's the same for animals: hens like to scratch the ground, then you give them your mulch to shred and eat all the seeds out of it and it avoids you work! The whole point is to observe natural habits or tendencies and use them in your favor. Work with them instead of against.


Permaculture's philosophy


Permaculture is about working not with one plant, one animal, but to work with interactions. As everything relates to everything, this implies that you have to try, as much as possible, to see the big picture: you decide you want hens to have eggs, but what else can it provide for you? How are you going to deal with all of their needs, characteristics and products? How can you sell them? Is there a market? What are the financial and labor costs? And so on...

So these principles can be applied way beyond simply agriculture. You can design gardens, houses, architectural settings (rooms in a house, rain water storage in altitude to use gravity, greenhouse on south side of house for heating...), people in an organization (choose right people for right job, rightly use human resources), farms, villages, offices, relationships, communities, web designs, economies, political systems... well examples and fields of applications are countless!
So "Permaculture" applies not only in "agri"-culture, but for "culture" itself. The human culture, history, society. In fact, the aim of permaculture is to design and create sustainable human societies.

Societies which by definition are based on sustainable agriculture, but also sustainable social and economical environments.

Societies based on 3 ethics of permaculture:
- Earth care
- People care
- Limitations to consumption and fair share.

Societies which are not unique, as following permaculture's only dogma: NO dogma!




 
Definition proposition of Permaculture

In that sense, permaculture is not only a farming method, nor a philosophy, nor a set of techniques, nor a landscaping design method... it's all of them at once.
So what kind of thing is it? Well permaculturists themselves have trouble defining it, and it takes at least a paragraph to do so approximately right...
To me, Permaculture is a conceptualized paradigm, that is to say a set of mind, a way of seeing the world.

Permaculture actually hasn't invented anything. However, it sets an ethical framework to utilize all of humanity's knowledge. This knowledge is mainly used to optimize the use, or even increase the potential of renewable and local resources. Indeed, in a world of dwindling energy sources, threatened by biodiversity loss and so on, one has to rethink our way of living. How can we live in harmony with our surroundings instead of constantly fitting against it and multiplying destructive behaviors.

Another thing to point out, is that you can never say that you are "doing permaculture" or are "not doing permaculture". As for any paradigm, it does not obey any fixed set of rules to follow. We are all influenced by several ways of thinking, and our mind set is always evolving more or less from one paradigm to the other. For instance, someone can be very good at producing its own local and organic food, but lives far away from any town where he needs to go work every day. We all make compromises, the only thing is that we have to keep evolving our practices towards more respectful and sustainable systems.