What is Permaculture? The Future of Human-Kind - Part 2

From that point on, Bill Mollison taught permaculture around the world, spreading good design principles and inspiring a global movement of people committed to restoring and protecting our home planet.

In our last newsletter, we discussed how permaculture is an ethical design science that aims to create productive landscapes that provide everything people need while conserving and regenerating the environment. It has been tested extensively since its creation and has matured into a complete system for gardening and farming with nature, allowing us to build a sustainable future without constantly struggling against natural processes.

We also explored how, by the time permaculture emerged in the 1970s, the world had already experienced tremendous soil loss, putting the long-term survival of civilization at risk—a problem that J. Russell Smith had warned about as early as the 1920s.

So, where are we now?

In this edition, in 4 minutes or less:

#1 How did we get Permaculture II

#2 People Continued Plowing and Believing in "Progress" - The world continued to do what does not work

#3 Why Permaculture outshines other ways of farming or gardening

1- How did we get Permaculture II

Bill Mollison, born 1 year prior (1928) to the publication of Tree Crops, experienced the destructive effects of this fossil-fuel-powered agriculture first hand, watching the forest and sea life of his homeland Tasminia vanish before his eyes. He got so disappointed by humanity that he decided to go into the bush and live there alone.

After setting up a garden that gave him food, and building a shelter, he got bored fast, and realized that what he really wanted was to make a positive constructive contribution to humanity.

He came back to civilization and eventually became professor of the University of Tasmania.

His field research made him realize that all the natural systems of nature are permanent. They self perpetuate in such a way that the more mature they are, the more stable, resilient, efficient, and self adjusting they become, producing higher quality yields (products).

The natural systems also anchor the whole biosphere - they are literally the life supporting system of the Earth.

What would be like to create an agricultural system that mimics that?

That is when he met David Holmgren, a young student who was as visionary as he was, at the University of Tasmania, where they were professor and student. David pitched Bill the embryo of the permaculture concept, and together they developed it into a design system for creating human habitats capable of providing food, water, raw materials, and stability in ways that support both people and the Earth, permanently.

That was Permaculture. Not planned scarcity and auto-destruction. Planned abundance.

2- People Continued Plowing and Believing in "Progress" - The world continued to do what does not work

It seems like history tells a similar story: find fertile land, exploit it, prosper for a while, then degrade it and decline. We are still repeating that pattern today.

There are valuable examples of civilizations that developed sustainable gardening and agriculture practices and enjoyed a long stable period of stability, abundance, and cultural flourishing. A couple of civilizations lasted for thousands of years supported by their sustainable practices, but collapsed because of other external or internal reasons that ended up disrupting their culture of sustainable land stewardship. Some examples are the old civilizations of the Incas, Hawaiians, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese.

In the 18th century, a new kind of scientist appeared, the plant explorers, who travelled the world to discover, catalog and study plants with economic potential. Russell Smith came after them, at the beginning of the 20th century, inheriting their work, and saw the economic potential of taking the identified most useful species and selectively breeding them into even more useful varieties, placing them inside a permanent system of tree crops.

However, those ideas were largely ignored, and, by the 1950s, the world moved to a phase when the mentality was "get big or get out", using big tractor to plow, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides... those were all the answers available. At that time, farmers were making a lot of money by this method, and interesting sustainable solution were in a all time low, and a lot of these ideas were forgotten because of the seeming success of this exploitative policy, even though soil erosion and loss of fertile land were occurring at frightening rates.

Then the oil crises of the 1970s exposed how fragile this system of exploitative agriculture really was. Its dependence on fossil fuels, chemicals, and ecological destruction became harder to ignore. The economy and long term viability of industrial culture became very shaky. That opened the door for a new generation of thinkers, drawing from J. Russell Smith, Masanobu Fukuoka, P.A. Yeomans, Buckminster Fuller, William A. Albrecht, Weston Price, and many others.

The work that marked the creation of Permaculture by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren was published in 1978.

3- Why Permaculture outshines other ways of farming or gardening

It's the opposite of planned obsolescence.

It can transform your relationship with nature through actionable practices.

Permaculture is a persistent system that supports human existence.

The main problem in practicing permaculture is not a lack of techniques but changing your mind to believe that another model, other than the exploitative chemical fertilizer-perticide-fuel-based model is able to do the work. We understand how challenging it can be to shift your mindset towards permaculture. That said, it is our turn to learn from it and garden or farm in the way we want. Impatience, industrial thinking, and economic pressures push short-term extraction over long-term care. Many want to change the land without changing themselves. Permaculture requires a shift in ethics—care for Earth and people, limits to consumption—and personal responsibility. When that shift occurs, nature does most of the work, because we know how to put a garden together.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren create this new word -Permaculture- to tell exactly that. It combines the words "permanent" and "culture".

They wanted to elevate the term Agricultural culture, that, in its origins, talked about the set of practices of a people to work the land. The cultural aspect has been taken out and transformed into Agribusiness or agricultural crop. This shift changed it into a system of planned obsolescence, because it was short-sighted and only focused on short term results. Permaculture talks about a Culture of Permanence, and it is all about how to live in a territory without depleting its fertility.

So, permaculture is sustainable agriculture, but sustainable agriculture is not permaculture because permaculture goes even bigger to include a sustainable human culture in all aspects of life.

It is a way of living informed by a ethical, scientific, rational process deeply connect with nature and its cycles, which we can iterate and act upon. It is about respect for the water, for the living beings living on the Earth, and for humans.

Bill Mollison and David Holmgren gave us a design system.

Our generation has the opportunity to continue its evolution, by putting it into practice, adapting it to our climates, communities, and lives, and sharing what we learn along the way.

Every thriving garden begins with a single decision to care for a place and its inhabitants.

See you next Tuesday!

Alexandre and Marina

P.S.: Next, we'll dive into home gardens in cool, humid climates, completing our deep dive into home gardens across every climate:

• ​Desert Garden – The Oasis Opportunity​
• ​Your Tropical Garden Could Be Eden—Or a Wasteland in 3 Years​

P.P.S.: For our new subscribers, I've put together a list of small actionable projects we've already covered:

• ​How to Find a Place to Garden: 5 Approaches​
• ​Turn a Patch of Grass into a Vegetable Bed Instantly - Sustainably and Without Backbreaking Work​
• ​Mulch - Your Garden's Secret Weapon is Literally Just Lying Around​
• ​How To Make Compost - The Simplest Easy Method to Make Compost in 18 Days​
• ​How Animals Power Your Garden (The Anti-Fragile Nursery Flywheel)​
• ​The Ultimate Checklist for Planting Trees that Thrive for Centuries​

P.P.P.S.: Some of you may have been wondering what happened to us after we missed a couple of newsletters. Following the accident we suffered, we needed time to recover both physically and emotionally, and many things had to be put on hold. We sincerely apologize for our absence.

This month, however, we traveled to Brazil to implement a water catchment system on a small farm. It was a very nice experience, and we're looking forward to sharing what we experienced with you in a future newsletter.

We're happy to say that we're getting back to writing.

We're also working on overcoming our camera shyness because we're planning to launch a YouTube channel dedicated to permaculture.

Would you be interested in watching that kind of content?