Permaculture (contracted from Permanent Agriculture…or even Permanent Culture), is a wholistic design system for sustainable human communities, encompassing but not limited to farm design, housing design, garden design, water capture and soil building; as well as community building and alternative economic systems.
Whilst Permaculture does not create the types of incredible machines that the likes of Tesla, Schauberger and Keely do, it is still a complete science based on biological and cyclical observations made by Bill Mollison himself. It also draws on the wisdom of the elders from indigenous communities across the globe. Like Schauberger, Bill Mollison was a master observer of patterns and systems in nature, largely gathered from the forests of Tasmania. An intellectual, who was in constant conflict with conventional university thinking and teaching, his work encompasses human sustainability applicable to all regions of the world from wet tropics, to cold temperate, from deserts to arctic. He has outlined a series of ethics, principles and directives to achieve real and sustainable outcomes that address all of the disastrous outcomes from current energy, land and water use.
Significantly, Permaculture creates interactive systems that puts people back into the forested landscape as managers, not a dominant species. He explains how energy moves through all of the natural systems eg. the importance of trees as water storage units that create localised rain. A mature Permaculture system creates more energy than in consumes (seemingly in conflict with the Laws of Thermodynamics at some levels), and is scaleable from a humble apartment balcony to a few acres of land, to broadscale farming and even across entire landscapes. [Paul Hastings]
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