Permaculture Principles and Goals

statue flowerPrinciples of Permaculture

  1. Everything is connected to everything else
  2. The integration of water, people, animals, land, plants, technologies, and community leads to productive and beautiful environments
  3. Build harmony, through cooperation with an attitude of Positivism

Goals of Permaculture

  1. 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.)
  2. Work with nature rather than against it
  3. Think globally act locally
  4. 100_0404Plan for small-scale, energy-efficient systems that are intensive rather than extensive
  5. Eat a bio-regional diet and bring food growing to the cities
  6. Hold water and fertility as high on the land as possible
  7. The problem is the solution: turn constraints into resources
  8. Reforest – restore earth fertility
  9. Emphasize native plants
  10. Increase sum of yields through succession, stocking, and stacking*
  11. Invent and re-invent – close the loops
  12. 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)

  13. zumaStart small and be prepared to make lots of little mistakes.
  14. The earth, Gaia, is the super client
  15. Permaculture starts at your doorstep and is a way of life.
  16. 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

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