Permaculture: A Brief Introduction

Permaculture was coined from the words permanent and agriculture by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. Both men, Mollison, the professor, and Holmgren, the grad student, where concerned about the environmental damage that industrialagriculture was causing.

Together, they sought to develop a method which would create a self-regulating and therefore sustainable food production system which nurtured the land rather than harming it. Permaculture designers observe and work with Nature rather than attempting to force Nature to fit into a mechanized production system.

Today, many designers, are applying permaculture design to developing communities, project governance and the urban environment.

Permaculture is an ethically based design system for creating sustainable human environments. The permaculture ethics are:

- care for the earth

- care for people

- taking responsibility for personal consumption and production and sharing the surplus.

Simply put, permaculture is a system design tool. It is a way of

• 1. looking at a whole system or problem
• 2. seeing connections between key elements (parts)
• 3. observing how the parts relate,