TerrieMiller.com

As I get ready to leave for a two-week permaculture design intensive, I thought I’d try to provide answers to at least one of the questions I get about it…”What’s Permaculture?”

I like one definition offered by Toby Hemmingway, author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture:

Permaculture is notoriously hard to define in a sound-bite. Here’s one way to describe it: If you think of natural building, sustainable agriculture, solar energy, graywater recycling, consensus process, and the like as tools, then permaculture is the toolbox that helps organize those tools and suggests how and when to use them.

Wikipedia gives good background, of course:

The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture. Through a series of publications, Mollison, Holmgren and their associates documented an approach to designing human settlements, in particular the development of perennial agricultural systems that mimic the structure and interrelationship found in natural ecologies.

Permaculture design principles extend from the position that “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children” (Mollison, 1990). The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could become designers of their own environments and able to build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society’s reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying the earth’s ecosystems.

While originating as an agro-ecological design theory, permaculture has developed a large international following of individuals who have received training through intensive two week long ‘permaculture design courses’. This ‘permaculture community’ continues to expand on the original teachings of Mollison and his associates, integrating a range of alternative cultural ideas, through a network of training, publications, permaculture gardens, and internet forums. In this way permaculture has become both a design system as well as a loosely defined philosophy or lifestyle ethic.

And I like this video introduction by Penny Livingston-Stark, who is one of the primary instructors for the class I’m taking:

For more, there’s series of videos on YouTube on “The Permaculture Concept”, with Bill Mollison. The editing and background music on these is rather dramatic…though the issues are important, this production lends a stink of new age fantasy or peak oil hysteria to the content which I dislike. That said, the content is good and you get to hear about it directly from Mollison, so here are links to it:

• The Permaculture Concept Part 1
• The Permaculture Concept Part 2
• The Permaculture Concept Part 3
• The Permaculture Concept Part 4
• The Permaculture Concept Part 5
• The Permaculture Concept Part 6

I think that all gives a pretty good answer to the “what is it” question. The other question…that of what I’m going to do with this training once I complete it…isn’t something I can answer yet. So far I’ve found out this about what I want:

• A lifestyle that’s in tune with and a part of the natural world
• To have a life full of animals, both wild and domesticated
• To live in a way that’s congruent with my deepest beliefs, even if it means being an outsider
• To be as close to life as possible. My greatest satisfaction in work comes from things that are directly related to living and life itself…food production and cooking, building and making, observing nature. I’m not happy with a life once removed, simply to earn money to buy all of the materials and labor that supports my life. As someone pointed out to me when I used that term, there is no such thing as “spare” time.
• To honor my need for an environment that offers contemplation and self expression. A big hurdle for me, but absolutely vital.

Permaculture is obviously related to some of these, and perhaps more indirectly related to others. But the truth is, I have no idea what I’m doing, and as I set out to camp with a group of strangers for two weeks and fill my head, hands and spirit with all sorts of new ideas and skills, I’m both enthusiastically excited and scared shitless. If nothing else, maybe I’m doing a better job of being in touch with my feelings.