PERMACULTURE
EVALUATION
CENTRE
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The Vision
David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, (Hepburn, Victoria, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, 2002)
Foreword
If the ‘Permaculture Principles’ that David Holmgren discusses in this extremely important book were applied to all that we do, we would be well on the road to sustainability, and beyond. Furthermore, we would be liberated from the lurking feelings of guilt that most of us feel when we reflect on what we are currently passing on to future generations.
Permaculture is about values and visions, and designs and systems of management that are based on holistic understanding, especially on our bio-ecological and psychosocial knowledge and wisdom. It is particularly about our relationships with, and the design and redesign of, natural resource management systems, so that they may support the health and well-being of all present and future generations. What is particularly puzzling is that whereas all engineers – people who work primarily with non-living materials – learn about design principles, nearly all agriculturists, and others working with living systems, are still able to graduate without ever discussing principles of design, let alone having any unit devoted to this critical competence. It is the persistent lack of recognition of the importance of design, of the importance of mutualistic relationships and high biodiversity within sustainable ecosystems, and of the need to design managed ecosystems based on this awareness that is responsible for so many of the problems we currently face in natural resource management.
Permaculture may be described in a diverse range of complementary ways. It is one expression of a next step in the evolution of natural resource management, particularly as it relates to agriculture, most of which is still stuck at an earlier evolutionary stage, characterized by deceptively simple designs based on specialisation, monocultures and simple rotations. These designs, the problems they produce, and the disruptive solutions commonly used to address them, have led to losses of topsoil, moisture holding capacity, fertility, productivity, resilience, wildlife habitat, biodiversity, including natural control organisms, and the gene pool upon which the system depends. To a permaculturist, agriculture’s growing dependence on resource inputs to compensate for this progressive degradation of its resource base and associated need to control pests and diseases, its increasingly negative energy budget, and growing waste production problems and environmental impacts, are all obviously predictable. This situation is particularly distressing because it can be largely avoided by applying the ‘Permaculture Principles’ outlined in the following pages. Instead of repeatedly wasting expertise, time, energy and resources in efforts to address such problems; at the ‘back-end’ of the system, permaculture enables us to avoid and minimise them by focusing on ‘front-end’ imaginative design and redesign initiatives. My particular experience of doing this has been focused mainly on pest control and soil management.
Permaculture also reflects the ongoing evolution of our knowledge systems. These are currently being driven by challenges from post-modemists and post-structuralists, feminists and eco-feminists, social ecologists, deep ecologists and eco-psychologists, and those interested in post-normal science, holism, sense-of-place, sustainability, communalism, spirituality and indigenous knowledge systems.
Many factors have contributed to the development of permaculture. Key among them are:
- synchronicity and collaboration across difference (the chance association between David Holmgren – the modest, reflective, thorough, follow-through person – and Bill Mollison – the wild ideas man with the public persona);
- the visioning of permaculture as an international movement;
- the requirement for teachers to have extensive training and field experience and to maintain ongoing practice in order to teach courses; and
- the integration of ethical and design principles into all aspects of theory and practice.
This comprehensive quality, and its associated heavy demands on the process of holistic planning and action, has also been a major barrier to many who would benefit from permaculture. Just as most people tend to opt for the aspirin rather than get their life in order, most farmers and gardeners remain similarly dependent on chemicals to ‘fix the headaches’ in their maldesigned and mismanaged production systems. Those who have crossed this barrier however, and found permanent design solutions to problems – that only need to be discovered once – are never willing to go back to the dependence, inefficiency and illusion of ‘magic-bullet solutions’.
David Holmgren has provided in the following chapters a reasoned, systematic and documented account, based particularly on his extensive experience, of the key principles for developing the intellectual competence to practise Permaculture. This must be matched with parallel experience in the field. Ideally this might include both work as an apprentice with a mentor, such as David, and also opportunities to experiment freely and boldly alone, without supervision. This latter work should focus on what I call ‘small, meaningful inttiatives that you can guarantee to carry through to completion’. Such initiatives minimise the chances of negative impacts from inappropriate designs, and feelings of discouragement from failure to follow-through on mega-projects.
As a holographic thinker – being open to the idea that anything one observes anywhere is likely to have parallel expressions everywhere – I am led to go beyond the usual boundaries that are put around permaculture. In fact, when I lived in North America I used to run workshops for permaculturists entitled ‘Permaculture of the Inner Landscape’. I did this because I had observed that many of these designers were being limited, not by their knowledge of external systems, but by their woundedness and need to ‘heal and redesign’ their internal systems. I encourage you to similarly try applying these Permaculture Principles to any area that might benefit from such holistic design theory and practice. Areas that immediately come to mind include human settlements and business enterprises, political and economic systems, and the health field, child rearing and learning environments.
This is the most advanced presentation of Permaculture concepts that I am aware of. The 12 principles have been extensively tested, not only by the author, who is the co-originator of permaculture, but also by thousands of permaculturists around the world. If Permaculture is new to you, this volume will provide you with an outstanding introduction to this holistic approach to landscape design. If you are a long time practitioner or teacher of Permaculture, it is likely that this is the book that you have been waiting for -to challenge and hone your ideas, and to use as the core text in your Permaculture courses. I hope you enjoy reading and referring to this extremely valuable book as much as I have.
Professor Stuart B. Hill
Foundation Chair of Social Ecology
University of Western Sydney
NSW, Australia