What is permaculture?
A little introduction
This article has been translated with Google Translate. You may find language incoherences but we hope your comprehension won’t be compromised.
Permaculture is a vast subject, often reduced to its applications in the garden: crop rotation, companion planting, mounds, etc. Through a series of thematic sheets, we will try to explain to you what permaculture really is and how you can apply it in your daily life to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle!
The origins of permaculture
The concept of permaculture was formalized in the 1970s by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. Bill Mollison gives the following definition:
Permaculture is an ethical design process aimed at building sustainable human habitats by mimicking the way nature works.
Bill Mollison & David Holmgren
Let’s go back to the essential terms:
Ethical design: permaculture is a problem-solving tool, not a dogma. As such, its goal is to provide solutions to various current issues, social, environmental, economic, or other. Ethics are important here: this problem solving is done within a framework of values advocating a more just, sustainable and equitable society.
Human habitats are to be taken in the broad sense. We are talking about nourishing systems, habitats, economic and social networks.
Permaculture is not limited to the garden, it can inspire us to find solutions to much more varied problems.
Imitation of how nature works is fundamental to achieving sustainable designs. It is about observing the functioning of cycles and natural ecosystems in order to draw inspiration from them in our lives.
To understand permaculture and its application to any type of project, we can separate it into three main areas:
- Three ethical principles: they are at the heart of establishing the right values and a philosophical framework.
- The design principles that serve as guides and inspiration for your projects. These are universal principles applicable in all situations.
- A set of tools and strategies that are more local and adapted to the specificities of a place, a culture, a climate (mulching, mounds, solar water heating, …). These strategies can guide you more specifically in solving your problems, but you will need to adapt them to your personal context.
In red are the ethical principles, in orange the design principles and the tools and strategies are in green.
Finally, the flower of permaculture illustrates the application of permaculture in different aspects of daily life. An article will be devoted to him in the Academy. Moreover, it is on the different petals of this flower that we have based our article categories!
To go further, we have a series of articles on each of these areas! Find them on the Permaculture Academy.
Image credits: Eucalyp, Freepik & dDara on flaticon.com