09/07/2023
People sometimes ask what is permaculture.
Sometimes people equate “gardening without chemicals” as permaculture. Below are the three core ethics of permaculture and the 12 principles of permaculture.
This below I’ve copied from milkwood https://www.milkwood.net/2023/07/04/what-is-permaculture/
Permaculture ethics
At the foundation of permaculture are three ethics: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share.
These core ethics, or some form of them, can be found in all traditional cultures. Bill Mollison and I, back in the 70s, saw that this ethical foundation was an essential basis for sustainable design – or what we called permaculture ~ David Holmgren, Permaculture Living course
We see these ethics as top-level thinking tools, and a good ‘first things first’ guide for how to live. You can use these ethics as a framework to guide your decision-making and actions while planning for a life worth living. Here’s what they mean to us at Milkwood.
Earth Care
This is care of the big Earth, our combined home, and care of the small earth, the soil beneath our feet. Earth care can be many things, including but not limited to organising, voting and taking action on things like climate justice; tending the earth that sustains each and every one of us with just and equitable food systems; and understanding that we are part of our ecosystems, not separate from them, and that we each need to step up to the responsibilities that go along with that.
People Care
People care is living our lives in a way that is kind, safe and healthy – for ourselves, our households and our communities – while doing the least harm possible to others. People care is supporting mutual aid, considering what we consume and its impacts on people far away, and how we vote. It’s how we show up in our communities – both in times of plenty and in times of crisis – to ensure the best outcome for everyone, not just ourselves.
People Care is how we work on decolonising our thinking and our actions, along with dismantling our inherited and internal racism; how we seek to be lifelong learners, to co-create a more just world; how we attempt to do the work, and not carry destructive patterns forward – for ourselves, our families and our communities.
Fair Share
Fair Share is passing on the surplus and, importantly, ensuring our portion is no larger than it needs to be. It’s reassessing what ‘need’ is to us, and making do with less if we can, to ensure there’s more for others – people, plants and all the other life, too. Planting more than we need, so that there’s enough to share.
Voting, advocating and taking action in a way that creates equity for those in our community who do not have our privileges. Fair Share is sharing seeds, skills and knowledge, so that more folks in more communities can thrive, and so that ecosystems and biodiversity can thrive, too.
Two happy people smiling about their crop swap goodies.
Community crop swap, 107 Projects, Gadigal Country / Redfern
Permaculture principles
Combined with the ethics, Holmgren defined 12 permaculture principles – (Mollison defined a different set which are also super useful, but let’s just go through these ones for today). You can use these to help you think about, plan, design, create things and act with a view to the greater whole. These principles are flexible thinking tools that you can adapt to designs, situations and challenges both big and small.
The strategies and techniques in permaculture are constantly varying . . . and what might be appropriate in one context is not in another. But the design principles are general guides that we can use to help shape what we’re doing, or reflect on whether a particular solution is a good one, or not. David Holmgren, Permaculture Living course
They’re not ‘rules’ by any means; they are simply tools to inform your thinking and decision making. These principles can be used to design big projects, but they can also be used to help you make better daily choices, and to form new habits.
1. Observe and interact
This principle reminds us to use all our senses and our powers of observation to truly assess things before taking action, rather than charging in based upon something we’ve read or been told.
2. Catch and store energy
This principle helps us remember that energy is flowing through our systems all the time – in sunlight, wind, water, money, the harvest, good will, and a million other forms – but that this energy often only comes in pulses; therefore, it’s important that we learn to store it so that we can use it when we need it.
3. Obtain a yield
Along with storing energy, this principle helps drive systems forward. It’s essential to obtain a yield in some form to carry on, whether that’s veggies, stored power, stored heat or stronger community relationships. Otherwise, it’s just not possible to survive long term.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
This principle balances the two before it, and is just as important. It’s a constraining principle, to ensure ongoing evaluation, and that you take the time to adjust to whatever you discover as a result.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services
A familiar concept to us all by now, this principle is about designing for and choosing services and resources that are renewable, rather than ones that are will deplete and disappear.
6. Produce no waste
You’ll be familiar with this one, as it thankfully creeps back into our society. It’s the concept of using every part of something, and making choices to only work with, buy or choose things that you can use entirely.
7. Design from patterns to details
This reminds us to look at the whole, rather than just the parts, when we begin to design something – which we often need to be reminded of in this reductionist world! The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
8. Integrate rather than segregate
This principle encourages us to integrate elements and functions rather than keep them neatly apart, because separation usually ends up requiring more resources. It’s about using one element’s output as another’s input: to reuse everything we can, reduce pollution, conserve energy and make the most of the resources that we have.
9. Use small and slow solutions
Think about the ways we can mimic the simple process of planting a small seed and watching it grow slowly into a big, beautiful tree. This principle is about elegance and efficiency of design: considering the simplest solution possible to achieve our goals – rather than doing something big and fast that inadvertently has negative impacts – while staying within our limits.
10. Use and value diversity
This is about valuing the biodiversity of life to create stable systems, using and valuing diverse solutions to a problem, and striving to live outside the binary (in all the ways!).
11. Use edges and value the marginal
This reminds us to look to the periphery, because that’s often where, frankly, the most interesting stuff is happening! These peripherals may seem small, but they’re often significant and can hold great value for all of us.
12. Creatively use and respond to change
This final principle is particularly powerful. It’s about acknowledging biological and other processes, and responding to them in a constructive way, rather than using extra energy to block or work against them. It’s going with the flow, and using that flow to your advantage, on both the micro and macro design level.
Permaculture is, in many ways, simply a goal: of living in functional, meaningful relation to our ecosystems, with reciprocity at the core of that relationship; a goal of living in a connected, meaningful way that benefits land, waters, life and community, as well as meeting our own needs for a fulf...
