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Permaculture, an introduction
Extract from: Bill Mollison with Reny Mia Slay, Introduction to Permaculture (Tyalgum NSW, Australia: Tagari, 1991)
PREFACE
I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. Everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal works; we caught fish, grew food, made bread. I didn’t know anybody who lived there who had only one job, or even anything that you could define as a job. Everybody worked at several things.
Until I was about 28, I lived in a sort of dream. I spent most of my time in the bush or on the sea. I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn’t until the 1950s that I noticed large parts of the system in which I lived were disappearing. Fish stocks started to collapse. Seaweed around the shore- lines had thinned out. Large patches of the forest began to die. I hadn’t realised until then that I had become very fond of them, that I was in love with my country.
After many years as a scientist with the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section and with the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Department, I began to. protest against the political and industrial systems I saw were killing us and the world around us. But I soon decided that it was no good persisting with opposition that in the end achieved nothing. I withdrew from society for two years; I did not want to oppose anything ever again and waste my time. I wanted to come back only with something very positive, some- thing that would allow us all to exist without the wholesale collapse of biological systems.
In 1968 I began teaching at the University of Tasmania, and in 1974, David Holmgren and I jointly evolved a framework for a sustainable agricultural system based on a multi-crop of perennial trees, shrubs, herbs (vegetables and weeds), fungi, and root systems, for which I coined the word “permaculture”. We spent a lot of time working out the principles of permaculture and building a species-rich garden. This culminated, in 1978, in the publication of Permaculture One, followed a year later by Permaculture Two.
Public reaction to permaculture was mixed. The professional community was outraged, because we were combining architecture with biology, agriculture with forestry , and forestry with animal husbandry , so that almost every- body who considered themselves to be a specialist felt a bit offended. But the popular response was very different. Many people had been thinking along the same lines. They were dissatisfied with agriculture as it is now practised, and were looking towards more natural, ecological systems.
As I saw permaculture in the 1970s, it was a beneficial assembly of plants and animals in relation to human settlements, mostly. aimed towards household and community self-reliance, and perhaps as a “commercial endeavour” only arising from a surplus from that system.
However, permaculture 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.
By 1976, I was lecturing on permaculture, and in 1979 I resigned from my teaching position and threw myself at an advanced age into an uncertain future. I decided to do nothing else but to try to persuade people to build good biological systems. I designed quite a few properties, and existed for a while by catching fish and pulling potatoes. In 1981 the first graduates of a standard permaculture design course also started to design permaculture systems in Australia. Today (1991), there are over 4,000 such graduates throughout the world, all involved in some aspect of environmental and social work. Bill Mollison [end p.v]
Introduction
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments. The word itself is a contraction not only of permanent agriculture but also of permanent culture, as cultures cannot survive for long without a sustainable agricultural base and landuse ethic. On one level, permaculture deals with plants, animals, buildings, and infrastructures (water, energy, communications). However, permaculture is not about these elements themselves, but rather about the relationships we can create between them by the way we place them in the landscape.
The aim is to create systems that are ecologically-sound and economically viable, which pro- vide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute, and are therefore sustainable in the long term. Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country , using the smallest practical area.
Permaculture is based on the observation of natural systems, the wisdom contained in traditional farming systems, and modem scientific and technological knowledge. Although based on ecological models, permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
Fukuoka, in his book The One Straw Revolution, has perhaps best stated the basic philosophy of permaculture. In brief, it is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating elements as a single- product system I have spoken, on a more mundane level, of using aikido on the landscape, of rolling with the blows, turning adversity into strength, and using everything positively. The other approach is to karate the landscape, to try to make it yield by using our strength, and striking many hard blows. But if we attack nature we attack (and ultimately destroy) ourselves.
I think harmony with nature is possible only if we abandon the idea of superiority over the natural world. Levi Strauss said that our pro- found error is that we have al ways looked upon ourselves as “masters of creation”, in the sense of being above it. We are not superior to other life-forms; all living things are an expression of Life. If we could see that truth, we would see the everything we do to other life- forms we also do to ourselves. A culture which understands this does not, without absolute necessity, destroy any living thing.
Permaculture is a system by which we can exist on the earth by using energy that is naturally in flux and relatively harmless, and by using food and natural resources that are abundant in such a way that we don’t continually destroy life on earth. Every technique for con- serving and restoring the earth is already known; what is not evident is that any nation or large group of people is prepared to make the change. However, millions of ordinary people are starting to do it themselves without help from po-[end p.1]litical authorities.
Wherever we live, we should start to do something. We can start first by decreasing our energy consumption—you can actually live on 40% of the energy you are now using without sacrificing anything of value. We can re-fit our houses for energy efficiency. We can cut our vehicle use by using public transportation and sharing with friends. We can save water off our roofs into tanks, or recycle greywater to the toilet system or garden. We can also begin to take some part in food production. This doesn’t mean that we all need to grow our own potatoes, but it may mean that we will buy them directly from a person who is already growing potatoes responsibly. In fact, one would probably do better to organise a farmer-purchasing group in the neighbourhood than to grow potatoes.
In all permanent agricultures, or in sustainable human culture generally, the energy needs of the system are provided by that system. Modern crop agriculture is totally dependent on external energies. The shift from productive permanent systems (where the land is held in common), to annual, commercial agricultures where land is regarded as a commodity involves a shift from a low to a high-energy society, the use of land in an exploitative and destructive way, and a demand for external energy sources, mainly provided by the third world as fuels, fertilisers, protein, labour, and skills.
Conventional farming does not recognise and pay its true costs: the land is mined of its fertility to produce annual grain and vegetable crops; non-renewable resources are used to sup- port yields; the land is eroded through over- stocking of animals and extensive ploughing; land and water are polluted with chemicals.
When the needs of a system are not met from within the system, we pay the price in energy consumption and pollution. We can no longer afford the true cost of our agriculture. It is killing our world, and it will kill us.
Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings hannony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.
ELEMENTS OF A TOTAL PERMACULTURE DESIGN [end p.2]
PERMACULTURE ETHICS
Ethics are moral beliefs and actions in relation to survival on our planet. In permaculture, we embrace a threefold ethic: care of the earth, care of people, and dispersal of surplus time, money, and materials towards these ends.
Care of the earth means care of all living and nonliving things: soils, species and their varieties, atmosphere, forests, micro-habitats, animals, and waters. It implies harmless and rehabilitative activities, active conservation, ethical and frugal use of resources, and “right livelihood” (working for useful and beneficial systems).
Care of the earth also implies care of people so that our basic needs for food, shelter, education, satisfying employment, and convivial human contact are taken care of. Care of people is important, for even though people make up a small part of the total living systems of the world, we make a decisive impact on it. If we can provide for our basic needs, we need not indulge in broadscale destructive practices against the earth.
The third component of the basic “care of the earth” ethic is the contribution of surplus time, money, and energy to achieve the aims of earth and people care. This means that after we have taken care of our basic needs and designed our systems to the best of our ability, we can extend our influence and energies to helping others achieve that aim. The permaculture system also has a basic life ethic, which recognises the intrinsic worth of every living thing. A tree is something of value in itself, even if it has no commercial value for us. That it is alive and functioning is what is important. It is doing its part in nature: recycling biomass, providing oxygen and carbon dioxide for the region, sheltering small animals. building soils, and so on.
So we see that the permaculture ethic pervades all aspects of environmental, community, and economic systems. Cooperation, not competition, is the key.
Ways we can implement the earthcare ethics in our own lives are as follows:
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