Principles of Permaculture
- Everything is connected to everything else
- The integration of water, people, animals, land, plants, technologies, and community leads to productive and beautiful environments
- Build harmony, through cooperation with an attitude of Positivism
Goals of Permaculture
- Long term self-reliance – consider the impact over the next seven generations. (A generation is the average time interval between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring.)
- Work with nature rather than against it
- Think globally act locally
Plan for small-scale, energy-efficient systems that are intensive rather than extensive- Eat a bio-regional diet and bring food growing to the cities
- Hold water and fertility as high on the land as possible
- The problem is the solution: turn constraints into resources
- Reforest – restore earth fertility
- Emphasize native plants
- Increase sum of yields through succession, stocking, and stacking*
- Invent and re-invent – close the loops
- Whatever we take, we must return:One calorie in/ One calorie out = sustainability
Input = output=energy cycling
The user must pay (ie: recycling, tree tax, seed collecting, composting, energy)
Start small and be prepared to make lots of little mistakes.- The earth, Gaia, is the super client
- Permaculture starts at your doorstep and is a way of life.
- The work of the Permaculture designer is to maximize useful energy storage in any system on which they are working, be it house, garden, urban property, or rural land.
*Succession = natural ecosystems change over time giving rise to different plants and animals
Stocking = find the balance of various elements keeping one from overpowering the other(s), number of elements in a guild
Stacking = add multi-level functions for each element