I first came across the term “Permaculture” (permanent agriculture) while reading a book about freeing oneself from the shackles of modern life. I was intruiged and sought to learn more. As I dug, I discovered it’s a little hard to get your head around.
A guy named Bill Mollison (above) co-founded the Permaculture “movement” in Australia in the 1970s and it has since rooted itself quite nicely all over the world.
In my own words (and a few ones stolen from others), Permaculture is a way of living, thinking and gardening that aims to give nature a big hug, rather than shun it. It’s all about “harmonious design”. It aims to create ecosystems that look after themselves, which often requires little human input (once the groundwork has been put into place). Permaculture seeks to create ecosystems that are as resilient as those found in nature.
In an interview by Context.org, Mr Mollison describes the multi-faceted Permaculture in his own words:
When the idea of Permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough. Once you’ve said to yourself, ‘But I’m not using my physics in my house’, or ‘I’m not using my ecology in my garden, I’ve never applied it to what I do’, it’s like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly, you say ‘If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!’. Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet.
You start with your nose, then your hands, your back door, your doorstep. You get all that right, then everything is right. If all that’s wrong, nothing can ever be right. Say you’re working for a big overseas aid organisation. You can’t leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80kms to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and [meanwhile] plan mud huts for Africa! You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are.”
I hope that was insightful. I’ll try to uncover more on this as I continue my research.
April
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