What Is All This Talk About Permaculture?

The term permaculture, meaning "permanent agriculture" was coined in the 1970's by Australian Bill Mollison. Originally it was a beneficial assembly of plants and animals in relation to human settlements, mostly aimed towards household and community self reliance, and perhaps as a commercial endeavor only arising from a surplus from the system.

However, permaculture has come to mean more than just food sufficiency in the household. Self-reliance in food is meaningless unless people have access to land, information, and financial resources. So in recent years it has come to encompass appropriate legal and financial strategies, including strategies for land access, business structures, and regional self-financing. This way it is a whole human system. When correctly designed such a system will, like a natural ecosystem, become increasingly diverse and self-sustaining.

All permaculture design is based on three ethics: Care of the earth (because all living things have intrinsic worth); care of the people; and reinvest all surpluses, whether it is information, money, or labor, to support the first two ethics.

Modern permaculture is a system design tool whose approach follows these 4 simple steps:

1. Looking at a whole system or problem
2. Observing how the parts relate
3. Planning to mend sick systems by applying ideas learned from long-term sustainable working systems.
4. Seeing connections between key parts.

Actually, you could apply these steps to all areas of your life. Once again, we are shown that we can learn a lot from Mother Earth.

For more information contact bill.swanson@cbshome.com or visit http://www.cbshome.com/.