What Is Permaculture?
-Earth Care –
-People Care –
-Fair Share-
Permaculture is a set of tools for shifting our thinking
from separation to connection, isolation to interdependence.
Permaculture is a system of ecological design that takes nature as our model, so we can meet human needs while regenerating the world around us
–Starhawk
Permaculture has three basic ethics: Care for the Earth, Care for People, and Care for the Future.
It has a set of principles that direct us to observe natural systems and mimic the way they work, catching and storing the sun’s energy, using biological and local resources, with minimal inputs of fossil fuel energy, and getting multiple uses out of each element.
Permaculture is no one technique or process, but rather weaves together multiple approaches, technologies and solutions to problems of sustainability. Instead of designing separate things, we design connections and beneficial relationships.
Permaculture favors low-tech solutions that empower ordinary people to take responsibility for their own needs and impacts. Our goal is more than sustainability: we work for abundance, regeneration, and healing.
No one solution or technology can save us: in fact, applying single or simplistic solutions generally will create new, unforeseen and possibly worse problems.
The word ‘permaculture’ was coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s, from “permanent agriculture,” but has come to encompass many sorts of systems: “permanent culture.”
Permaculture is ecological design aimed at creating systems that meet human needs while regenerating and healing the environment around us. It does this by applying a set of ethics and principles that guide us in designing connections, flows, and beneficial relationships among various elements, whether in a garden, a building or an organization, and mimicking the way that nature works.
We see permaculture as a vitally important set of ideas and practices in this crucial time. We have a very narrow window of time left in which to respond to climate change and environmental degradation. If we don’t, we face ecological and human catastrophes that are beyond imagining.
One example is biofuels— when rainforests are cut down and new land is plowed for biofuel cultivation, when human food supplies are diminished in favor of growing fuel, biofuels simply worsen the problem. When ‘wastes’ such as used restaurant grease are turned into biofuels—as the city of San Francisco now does to run its buses—they can be part of the solution. Only an integrated systems approach can find effective solutions to environmental and social ills.
Permaculture is also a global movement and network. A permaculture design course includes a 72-hour basic curriculum that introduces the principles, practices, techniques, and spectrum of solutions available for food growing, building, energy and economics.
Permaculture practitioners are involved in projects all over the world—we have more on-the-ground projects in the Developing World than the United Nations. Vietnam adopted permaculture as its core agricultural system, and increased production over 15%. Cuba turned to permaculture after the Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it their major oil supplies and markets, and now feeds its people with organic crops, many of which are grown in and around cities.
DECOLONIZING PERMACULTURE
Read about our commitment to Indigenous soliarity and decolonizing permaculture here.
YOUR LEARNING JOURNEY
Ready to Learn More?
Take the next steps in your learning journey by enrolling in our Permaculture Design Certificate course – starting in February and August 2022.
OUR NETWORK
A core component of this course – and every Earth Activist Training course – is our private forum: Earth Activist Training Online network. This platform is where you will find course resources, your homework, and a network to connect with classmates and other Earth Activist students.
Recordings of each class will be available to you as a resource. You will have access to the course for a year after the course ends should you want to deepen your understanding of the material.
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