What is Permaculture? The Future of Human-Kind
Mankind has made scientific progress that altered the course of history forever.
But in 1978, two Australians set out to answer a deeper question: how can human life be sustained on Earth, permanently?
From an unexpected collaboration between Bill Mollison - a rugged professor from the University of Tasmania, almost an Australian Indiana Jones of agriculture - and his provocative young student David Holmgren, Permaculture was born.
In this edition, in 4 minutes or less:
#1 Permaculture is a Science
#1 Permaculture: Saving Our Home Planet and Taking Care of Our Neighbors
#3 How did we get Permaculture I
Permaculture is a Science
Permaculture aims to:
productive landscapes that provide what human life needs:
- nutrient dense food
- clear water and air
- shelter
- human connection (Sense of Community/Gemeinschaftgefühl)
- protection for nature, which is the life support system of the Earth, our home.
It's not only about survival, but about thriving.
And one of my favourite parts: permaculture is ethical. Its objective is to create positive change while excluding, by design, destructive side effects like pollution, species extinction, deforestation, dependence on finite resources, and social unrest.
It seems like it's promising too much, and, back in 1978, people might have argued that, but today, after decades of its inception and hundreds if not thousands of experiments across climates, cultures, and scales, we can say with confidence:
Permaculture works.
Watch this YouTube video about the results of a permaculture project in a village in India that has dramatically improved the lives, economy, ecology, and stability of the community.
Permaculture: Saving Our Home Planet and Taking Care of Our Neighbors
As medical doctors, what appeals to us in Permaculture, in that it is both intellectual and practical.
It asks us to think as a person of action and act as a person of thought. That matters, because it is hard to find gardening and farming practices that do not poison us, degrade nature, or create more problems than they solve.
It's also overwhelming how much ineffective sustainable practices there are, because they lack depth.
On top of that, the overarching objective of nature conservation, and doing good for all the living beings on Earth, including us humans, is in sync with the Hippocratic Oath that we took.
Permaculture is a complete system and method for gardening and farming with nature, so that we do not have to struggle to create a sustainable future.
The three main points to understand Permaculture are:
1: How did we get Permaculture
2: The world continued to do what doesn't work
3: Why Permaculture outperforms other ways of farming or gardening
1- How did we get Permaculture I
The history of nations and empires is deeply tied to agriculture.
Those with the most fertile land could grow better food and feed stronger armies.
But again and again, civilizations depleted the soils and natural resources that sustained them by carrying out exploitative practices. When fertility declined, power declined with it.
Steve Solomon, author of The Intelligent Gardener, paints world history through exactly this lens.
But this insight is much older than modern agriculture. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, dramatist, natural scientist, politician, and Stoic born in 1 C.E, was already reflecting on agriculture, stewardship, and the consequences of excess.
Then modernity accelerated everything. With the mechanized plow, humans multiplied the speed and scale of their impact. J. Russell Smith, professor of economic geography at Columbia University, saw this clearly. He warned that plowing caused erosion, nutrient loss, and the rapid collapse of soil productivity. so much so that there is nothing left to do but to abandon the site. That was the hallmark of the 20th century, and it was what first drew Russell Smith's attention to this issue - the loss of productive soil. Land that nature had built over centuries could be exhausted in just a few years. Smith argued that by using tree crops and soil conservation -at that moment, he was essentially creating agro-forestry-agriculture could become permanent instead of destructive.
He published that study in 1929 in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture.
However plowing was only one part of the story. Add pollution, deforestation, overhunting, and overfishing, and we arrive at the modern crisis: the destruction of the natural systems that support life, at a speed faster than nature can repair them. Modern industrial agriculture became, in many ways, a system of planned obsolescence for life on Earth.
Would it be crazy to try to help nature, our life support system, rebuild itself while we produce what we need to thrive?
David Holmgren had the insight that started the development of Permaculture while he was an undergraduate.
He observed that the fields of ecology, landscape design and agriculture had overlaping points and could contribute to one another, but were compartmentalized in a reductionist way.
- Ecology studies the relationships between living organisms and their environment.
- Landscape architecture studies how to plan outdoor spaces to create a harmonious balance between non-living elements (patios, walls, and paths) and living elements (plants, trees, and lawns), focusing on both the aesthetic appeal and functional sustainability of a property.
- Agriculture studies the practice of cultivating the soil, planting, raising, and harvesting both food and non-food crops, as well as livestock production
David Holmgren could see how two of these connected, but he couldn't see where the three intersected, but his hypothesis was that by connecting the three disciplins, he would be able to uncover how to plan landscapes for human living, producing everything we need, while taking care of nature.
David attended a lecture by Bill Mollison at the University of Tasmania and connected with him afterwards. After sharing that he was trying to study that intersection of Ecology, Landscape architecture and agriculture and how natural systems could influence that, they started to work together on the Permaculture manuscript.
By studying how nature designs resilient and self-sustaining systems, they realized that by uniting these three fields they could develop a framework for creating permanent agriculture, permanent culture, and planned abundance.
Next week, we will continue this journey by exploring:
1: How did we get Permaculture II
2: The world continued to do what doesn't work
3: Why Permaculture outperforms other ways of farming or gardening
