Care of the Earth --- Care of the People
Share the Surplus
The definition above and below comes from:
http://www.urbanharvest.org/permaculture/definition.html
Permaculture started with a collaboration between Bill Mollison and David Holmgren at the University of Tasmania in the 1970’s. The foundation text by these two founders was Permaculture One (1978). It was followed up by Mollison’s much more comprehensive Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual (1988). Many permaculture teachers regard that book as a seminal work.
Permaculture is an ecological, holistic and sustainable design system and philosophy for human living spaces. It is a viable method for finding sustainable solutions to modern problems. It has been successfully used around the world to maximize food production, regenerate springs, cool homes without air conditioning, revive deserts, transform lives, reorganize towns and neighbourhoods, reduce pollution, and much else.
The essence of permaculture is summed up by 3 ethic principles:
Care of the Earth --- Care of the People --- Share the Surplus
The term permaculture refers to a nature-inspired design philosophy for creating permanent cultures by assuring their prerequisite— permanent, that is sustainable, agriculture. Mollison was concerned decades ago about the unsustainable nature of our fossil fuel economy. An as a forester, he was impressed with the stability and productivity of mature forests. He believed that humans could profitably copy many of the ideas we get from observing nature and applying them in gardens, towns, and structures we create.
Broadly, permaculture is an effort to reduce labor needed and energy consumed in all aspects of human endeavour so that scarce resources are used to their max and waste is absolutely minimized. One concomitant of the effort to reduce waste and energy use is the effort to produce as much food as possible as close to where one lives as is practical.
The permacultural method borrows heavily from a very accurate understanding of ecology, the efficiencies nature creates, and an effort to understand all technologies ancient and modern that might help.
