Principles of Permaculture Design. David Holmgren
David Holmgren is author: Permaculture Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability.
Assembled and produced by Tracy Dee Cook and Andrew Leslie Phillips
Hancock Permaculture Center.
012509
Permaculture principles are brief statements or slogans - a checklist when considering the complex options for design and evolution of ecological support systems. These principles are universal, although methods that express them vary greatly according to place and situation.
Principle 1: OBSERVE AND INTERACT
In conservative and socially bonded agrarian communities, the ability to observe and adapt traditional and modern methods of land use, is a powerful tool to evolving new and more appropriate systems.
Good design depends on thoughtful and protracted observation of people and nature. It is not generated in isolation but through continuous and reciprocal interaction with the subject.
Observing then combining traditional and modern ecological permaculture design will be more successful than fossil fuel dependent systems. A diversity of local systems will naturally generate their own innovative ideas which will interact and cross-fertilize creating redundancy and resilience - a Mandelbrot set of self-replicating sustainable systems.
Principle 2: CATCH AND STORE ENERGY
Laws of Thermodynamics.
First Law: the law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The energy entering a system is accounted for as either stored or leaking out of the system (entropy).
Second Law: the law of degradation of energy. In all processes, energy loses its ability to do work and is degraded in quality over time. The tendency of potential energy to be consumed and degraded is described as entropy, which is a measure of disorder, which always increases.
We live in a world of unprecedented wealth - the result of harvesting enormous amounts of fossil fuels created over billions of years. In financial language: we are consuming global capital (natural resources) in a reckless manner that would send any business bankrupt.
Inappropriate concepts of wealth and growth lead us to ignore opportunities to capture local flows of renewable and non-renewable energy. Identifying and acting on these opportunities can redirect energy to rebuild natural capital, and provide "income" for our immediate needs.
Sources of energy include:
* Sun, wind and water.
* Wasted resources from agricultural, industrial and commercial activities.
The most important storages of future value include:
* Fertile soil with high humus content able to store large amounts of water.
* Perennial vegetation systems, especially trees yielding food and other useful resources.
* Correctly placed water bodies and storage tanks/cisterns, swales.
* Passive solar buildings.
* seeds.
Principle 3: OBTAIN A YIELD
The previous principle focused on the need to use existing wealth for long-term investments in natural capital. But there is no point attempting to plant a forest for the grandchildren if we don’t have food today.
We should design systems to provide self-reliance at all levels (including ourselves), using captured and stored energy to effectively maintain the system, and capture more energy. A sustainable system is one that produces more energy than it consumes over the lifetime of the system.
Without immediate and useful yields, our design will tend to wither. Elements that generate immediate yield will proliferate. Whether we attribute this to nature, market forces or human greed, systems that most effectively obtain yield and use it most effectively to meet needs, tend to prevail.
Principle 4: APPLY SELF-REGULATION AND ACCEPT FEEDBACK
This principle deals with self-regulatory aspects of permaculture that limit inappropriate growth or behavior. Understanding how positive and negative feedback works in nature, we design systems that are more self-regulating, thus reducing the work involved in repeated, harsh corrective management.
Self-maintaining and regulating systems are the holy grail of permaculture, the ideal for which we strive. By applying integration and diversity (Permaculture design principles 8 & 10) we fosters self-reliance. A system composed of self-reliant elements is more robust and resilient.
Use of tough, semi-wild and self-reproducing crop varieties and livestock breeds, is classic permaculture. On the human scale, self-reliant farmers were once recognized as the basis of a strong and independent country. Today's globalized economies and huge monocultures make for greater instability and the effects cascade around the world.
Principle 5: USE AND VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SERVICES
Renewable resources are those that can be renewed and replaced by natural processes without need for major non-renewable inputs over reasonable time. In the language of business, renewable resources are sources of income. Non-renewable resources are capital assets.
Spending capital assets for day-to-day living is unsustainable. Permaculture design aims to make best use of renewable natural resources to manage and maintain yields. Permaculture includes use of non-renewable resources needed to establish systems when it is sustainable to do so.
When we use a tree for wood we use a renewable resource. When we use a tree for shade and shelter, we gain benefits from the living tree that are non-consuming and require no harvesting energy. This simple understanding is obvious and powerful in redesigning systems. Where many simple functions are dependent on non-renewable and unsustainable, “cheap” energy, it is unsustainable.
Principle 6: PRODUCE NO WASTE
The industrial process, which supports modern life is characterized by an input-output model where inputs are natural resources and energy and outputs are goods and services.
However, when we step back from this process and take the long-term view, we see these “useful things” end up as waste choking our landfills. This model might better be characterized as "consume/excrete". Viewing people as consumers and excretors might be biological, but it is not ecological.
Apply traditional values of frugality and care for material goods and concern about pollution. A more radical perspective views waste as a resource and an opportunity. The earthworm lives by consuming plant litter (wastes) converting it to humus improving the soil for itself, for soil microorganisms, and plants. Thus the earthworm, like all living things, is a part of a web, where the outputs of one are the inputs for another. From pattern to detail!
Principle 7: DESIGN FROM PATTERNS TO DETAILS
The first six principles tend to consider systems from the bottom-up perspective of elements, organisms, and individuals. The second six principles tend to emphasis the top-down perspective of patterns and relationships that tend to emerge by system self-organization and co-evolution.
From observation and pattern recognition we see that nature reveals branching patterns common to many systems. It helps us understand scale and ratios in nature. A tree usually has nine main branches and so do river systems. Mountain ranges and sand dunes, waves and leaves and even our capillaries, follow similar ratios of scale and branching patters.
The commonality of patterns observable in nature and society allows us to not only make sense of what we see, but adapt one pattern from one context and scale, to another. Pattern recognition is an outcome of the application of Principle 1: Observe and interact, and is the necessary precursor to the process of design.
The idea behind permaculture is the forest as a model for agriculture. While not new, this model offers the opportunity to apply one of the most common ecosystem models, to human land use.
Terms like stacking functions, vertical zones, polyculture, forest garden, edge-thinking, sacred land, water sheds, water and rivers, diversity, constants, resilience, redundancy, cycles and yields, inform design.
The use of zones of intensity/activity around an activity center such as a homestead, to locate elements and sub-systems, is an example of working from pattern to details.
Similarly environmental factors – the wild energies of sun, wind, flood, and fire - can be arranged in sectors around the same focal point. These sectors have both a bioregional and a site-specific character to make sense of a site and help organize appropriate design elements into a workable system.
Principle 8: INTEGRATE RATHER THAN SEGREGATE
In every aspect of nature, from internal workings of organisms to whole ecosystems, we find connections between things are as important as the things themselves. Thus the purpose of functional and self-regulating design, is placement of elements serving the needs and accepting products of other elements - a web of connections and biofeedback.
This principle focuses more closely on relationships that draw elements together in more closely integrated systems - improved methods of designing communities of plants, animals and people to gain benefits from these relationships: guild planting. Creating symbiosis. Diversity. Redundancy.
Correct placement of plants, animals, earthworks and other infrastructure, encourages a higher degree of integration and regulation without need for constant human input and corrective management. Allowing gravity to work for you - free energy to permeate design, provides elegant and cost-free solutions.
For example, by appropriately locating, scratching poultry under forage forests where they feed on the food forest itself, without direct input from the farmer, we can harvest litter to down-slope garden systems efficiently. The fertilized run-off can be part of the system. Of course the chickens provide many more functions including chicken tractor applications.
Herbaceous and woody weed species in animal pasture systems often build and improve soil contributing nitrogen, biodiversity, medicinal and other special uses. Appropriate rotationally grazed livestock can control weedy species without eliminating them and their value, pruning them as well as manuring the property.
But this agrarian example could serve in other systems design too. Permaculture and pattern understanding can help inform community and financial design. It is a design tool – a way of approaching design toward sustainability and higher yield.
Two statements in permaculture literature and teaching have been central:
* Each element performs many functions.
* Each important function is supported by many elements.
The connections, or relationships between elements of an integrated system, can vary greatly. Some may be predatory or competitive; others co-operative, or even symbiotic. But all relationships can be beneficial in building strong integrated systems or community. Permaculture strongly emphasizes building mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships. A paradox?:
- We have a cultural disposition to see and believe in predatory and competitive relationships, and discount co-operative and symbiotic relationships, in nature and culture.
- Co-operative and symbiotic relationships will be more adaptive in a future of declining energy. Cooperation not competition is a prime ethic of permaculture.
Principle 9: USE SMALL AND SLOW SOLUTIONS
Systems should be designed to perform functions at the smallest scale practical and energy-efficient for that function. Human scale and capacity should be the yardstick for a humane, democratic and sustainable society.
In forestry, fast growing trees are often short-lived, while some apparently slow growing, but more valuable species, accelerate and even surpass fast species in their second and third decades. A small plantation of thinned and pruned trees can yield more total value than a large plantation without management. Understanding cycles and rhythms in nature, seeking niches in time and space, creates more long-term productivity.
Principle 10: USE AND VALUE DIVERSITY
The great diversity of forms, functions and interactions in nature and humanity are the source of evolving systemic complexity. The role and value of diversity in nature, culture and permaculture is complex, dynamic, and at times apparently contradictory. Diversity needs to be seen as balance and tension in nature, between variety and possibility on the one hand, and productivity and power on the other.
Monoculture is vulnerable to pests and diseases, and requires widespread use of toxic chemicals and fossil fuel energy to maintain itself. Inputs outnumber outputs, It is unsustainable.
Polyculture (the cultivation of many plant and/or animal species and varieties within an integrated system) is one of the most important and widely recognized applications of the use of diversity to reduce vulnerability to pests, adverse seasons and market fluctuations. Polyculture reduces reliance on market systems, and bolsters household and community self-reliance by providing a wider range of goods and services. Developing polyculture systems in proximity to population centers will increase the stability and resilience of those communities.
Principle 11: USE EDGES AND VALUE THE MARGINS
When the forest meets the field, one ecosystem rubs up against another creating a third ecosystem, which is more diverse, producing more yield. The same thing happens when communities are rubbed together, new bonds are created, there is cross-fertilization of ideas and talent that spawns new relationships. There is more life!
This principle works from the premise that the value and contribution of edges, the marginal and invisible aspects of any system, should not only be recognized and conserved, but expanded to increase the systems productivity and stability.
For example, increasing the edge between field and pond increases the productivity of both. Alley farming and shelterbelt forestry are systems where increasing edge between field and forest contributes to productivity.
Tidal estuaries are complex interfaces between land and sea - a great ecological trading market between two domains of life. The shallow water allows penetration of sunlight for algae and plant growth providing forage areas for fish and birds. Fresh water from catchment streams rides over the heavier saline water pulsing back and forth with the daily tides, redistributing nutrients and food for the teeming life. There are many lateral and horizontal edges.
Within every terrestrial ecosystem, the living soil, which may only be a few centimeters deep, is the edge, or interface between non-living mineral earth and the atmosphere. For all terrestrial life, including humanity, this is the most important edge of all. It is the fragile edge of life about as thick as the skin of an apple if an apple were the earth.
Only a limited number of hardy species can thrive in shallow, compacted and poorly drained soil. Deep, well-drained and aerated soil is like a sponge, a great interface that supports productive and healthy plant life. One of the central tenants of permaculture is to build soil.
Applying three-dimensional thinking to edges encourages more yield. Where the atmosphere meets the water and the mist between, are all edges. The edge is the transition point where one thing becomes the other.
Principle 12: CREATIVELY USE AND RESPOND TO CHANGE
Permaculture is concerned with the durability of natural living systems and human culture, but durability, paradoxically, depends on flexibility and change. Many stories and traditions have a theme: “in greatest stability lay the seeds of change”. At the cellular and atomic level, science shows that the solid and permanent is really a seething mass of energy and change. This is similar to the descriptions in various spiritual traditions.
In permaculture literature and practice, the acceleration of ecological succession within cultivated systems, is the most common expression of this principle. For example, the use of fast growing nitrogen fixing trees to improve soil, and provide shelter and shade for more valuable slow growing food trees, reflects an ecological succession process from pioneers to climax.
The progressive removal of nitrogen fixers for fodder and fuel, as the tree crop system matures, is a renewable yield and will encourage the forest to grow even stronger. The seed in the soil capable of regeneration after natural disaster or land use change provides insurance to re-establish the system in the future.
ends holmgren
The Principles of Permaculture Design: Bill Mollison
Author: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”
The principles of permaculture provide a set of universally applicable guidelines to design sustainable habitats. Distilled from multiple disciplines–ecology, energy conservation, landscape design, and environmental science. These principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. The following is a list of these principles.
1. RELATIVE LOCATION:
Components placed in a system are viewed relatively, not in isolation.
2. FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMPONENTS:
Everything is connected to everything else. Create a web of life.
3. RECOGNIZE FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELEMENTS:
Every function is supported by many elements.
4. RECUNDANCY:
Good design ensures all-important functions can withstand the failure of one or more elements. Design backups.
5. EVERY ELEMENT IS SUPPORTED BY MANY FUNCTIONS:
Each element we include is a system, chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
6. LOCAL FOCUS:
"Think globally - Act locally" Grow your own food, cooperate with neighbors. Community efficiency not self-sufficiency.
7. DIVERSITY:
As a general rule, as sustainable systems mature they become increasingly diverse in both space and time. What is important is the complexity of the functional relationships that exist between elements not the number of elements.
8. USE BIOLOGICAL RESOURCES:
We know living things reproduce and build up their availability over time, assisted by their interaction with other compatible elements. Use and reserve biological intelligence.
9. ONE CALORIE IN/ONE CALORIE OUT:
Do not consume or export more biomass than carbon fixed by the solar budget.
10. STOCKING:
Finding the balance of various elements to keep one from overpowering another over time. How much of an element needs to be produced in order to fulfill the need of whole system?
11. STACKING: Multilevel functions for single element (stacking functions). Multilevel garden design, i.e., trellising, forest garden, vines, groundcovers, etc.
12. SUCCESSION:
Recognize that certain elements prepare the way for systems to support other elements in the future, i.e.: succession planting.
13. USE ON-SITE RESOURCES:
Determine what resources are available and entering the system on their own and maximize their use.
14. EDGE EFFECT:
Ecotones (degrees of edge) are the most diverse and fertile area in a system. Two ecosystems come together to form a third which has more diversity than either of the other two, i.e.: edges of ponds, forests, meadows, currents etc.
15. ENERGY RECYCLING:
Yields from system designed to supply onsite needs and/or needs of local region.
16. SMALL SCALE:
Intensive systems start small and create a system that is manageable and produces a high yield.
17. MAKE LEAST CHANGE FOR GREATEST EFFECT:
The less change generated, the less embedded energy is used to endow the system.
18. PLANTING STRATEGY:
First natives, second proven exotics, third unproven exotics - carefully on small scale with lots of observation.
19. WORK WITH NATURE:
Aiding the natural cycles results in higher yield and less work. A little support goes a long way.
20. APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY:
The same principles apply to cooking, lighting, transportation, heating, sewage treatment, water and other utilities.
21. LAW OF RETURN:
Whatever we take, we must return every object must responsibly provide for its replacement.
22. STRESS AND HARMONY:
Stress here may be defined as either prevention of natural function, or of forced function. Harmony may be defined as the integration of chosen and natural functions, and the easy supply of essential needs.
23. THE PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION:
We are the problem, we are the solution. Turn constraints into resources. Mistakes are tools for learning.
24. THE FIELD OF A SYSTEM IS THEORETICALLY UNLIMITED:
The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible is the limit of information and imagination of designer.
25. DISPERSAL OF YIELD OVER TIME:
Principal of seven generations. We can use energy to construct these systems, providing that in their lifetime, they store or conserve more energy that we use to construct them or to maintain them thereby building sustainable systems.
26. A POLICY OF RESPONSIBILITY TO RELINQUISH POWER:
The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system.
27. PRINCIPLE OF DISORDER:
Order and harmony produce energy for other uses. Disorder consumes energy to no useful end. Tidiness is maintained disorder. Chaos has form, but is not predictable. The amplification of small fluctuations.
28. ENTROPY:
In complex systems, disorder is an increasing result. Entropy and life force are a stable pair that maintain the universe to infinity.
29. METASTABILITY:
For a complex system to remain stable, there must be small pockets of disorder.
30. ENTELECHY:
Principal of genetic intelligence. i.e. The rose has thorns to protect itself.
31. OBSERVATION:
Protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless destructive labor.
32. OPPORTUNITY:
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.
33. PATIENCE:
Wait one year: (See #31,Observation, above)
34. GRAVITY:
Hold water and fertility as high (in elevation) on the landscape as possible. Its all downhill from there.
David Holmgren is author: Permaculture Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability.
Assembled and produced by Tracy Dee Cook and Andrew Leslie Phillips
Hancock Permaculture Center.
012509
Permaculture principles are brief statements or slogans - a checklist when considering the complex options for design and evolution of ecological support systems. These principles are universal, although methods that express them vary greatly according to place and situation.
Principle 1: OBSERVE AND INTERACT
In conservative and socially bonded agrarian communities, the ability to observe and adapt traditional and modern methods of land use, is a powerful tool to evolving new and more appropriate systems.
Good design depends on thoughtful and protracted observation of people and nature. It is not generated in isolation but through continuous and reciprocal interaction with the subject.
Observing then combining traditional and modern ecological permaculture design will be more successful than fossil fuel dependent systems. A diversity of local systems will naturally generate their own innovative ideas which will interact and cross-fertilize creating redundancy and resilience - a Mandelbrot set of self-replicating sustainable systems.
Principle 2: CATCH AND STORE ENERGY
Laws of Thermodynamics.
First Law: the law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The energy entering a system is accounted for as either stored or leaking out of the system (entropy).
Second Law: the law of degradation of energy. In all processes, energy loses its ability to do work and is degraded in quality over time. The tendency of potential energy to be consumed and degraded is described as entropy, which is a measure of disorder, which always increases.
We live in a world of unprecedented wealth - the result of harvesting enormous amounts of fossil fuels created over billions of years. In financial language: we are consuming global capital (natural resources) in a reckless manner that would send any business bankrupt.
Inappropriate concepts of wealth and growth lead us to ignore opportunities to capture local flows of renewable and non-renewable energy. Identifying and acting on these opportunities can redirect energy to rebuild natural capital, and provide "income" for our immediate needs.
Sources of energy include:
* Sun, wind and water.
* Wasted resources from agricultural, industrial and commercial activities.
The most important storages of future value include:
* Fertile soil with high humus content able to store large amounts of water.
* Perennial vegetation systems, especially trees yielding food and other useful resources.
* Correctly placed water bodies and storage tanks/cisterns, swales.
* Passive solar buildings.
* seeds.
Principle 3: OBTAIN A YIELD
The previous principle focused on the need to use existing wealth for long-term investments in natural capital. But there is no point attempting to plant a forest for the grandchildren if we don’t have food today.
We should design systems to provide self-reliance at all levels (including ourselves), using captured and stored energy to effectively maintain the system, and capture more energy. A sustainable system is one that produces more energy than it consumes over the lifetime of the system.
Without immediate and useful yields, our design will tend to wither. Elements that generate immediate yield will proliferate. Whether we attribute this to nature, market forces or human greed, systems that most effectively obtain yield and use it most effectively to meet needs, tend to prevail.
Principle 4: APPLY SELF-REGULATION AND ACCEPT FEEDBACK
This principle deals with self-regulatory aspects of permaculture that limit inappropriate growth or behavior. Understanding how positive and negative feedback works in nature, we design systems that are more self-regulating, thus reducing the work involved in repeated, harsh corrective management.
Self-maintaining and regulating systems are the holy grail of permaculture, the ideal for which we strive. By applying integration and diversity (Permaculture design principles 8 & 10) we fosters self-reliance. A system composed of self-reliant elements is more robust and resilient.
Use of tough, semi-wild and self-reproducing crop varieties and livestock breeds, is classic permaculture. On the human scale, self-reliant farmers were once recognized as the basis of a strong and independent country. Today's globalized economies and huge monocultures make for greater instability and the effects cascade around the world.
Principle 5: USE AND VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SERVICES
Renewable resources are those that can be renewed and replaced by natural processes without need for major non-renewable inputs over reasonable time. In the language of business, renewable resources are sources of income. Non-renewable resources are capital assets.
Spending capital assets for day-to-day living is unsustainable. Permaculture design aims to make best use of renewable natural resources to manage and maintain yields. Permaculture includes use of non-renewable resources needed to establish systems when it is sustainable to do so.
When we use a tree for wood we use a renewable resource. When we use a tree for shade and shelter, we gain benefits from the living tree that are non-consuming and require no harvesting energy. This simple understanding is obvious and powerful in redesigning systems. Where many simple functions are dependent on non-renewable and unsustainable, “cheap” energy, it is unsustainable.
Principle 6: PRODUCE NO WASTE
The industrial process, which supports modern life is characterized by an input-output model where inputs are natural resources and energy and outputs are goods and services.
However, when we step back from this process and take the long-term view, we see these “useful things” end up as waste choking our landfills. This model might better be characterized as "consume/excrete". Viewing people as consumers and excretors might be biological, but it is not ecological.
Apply traditional values of frugality and care for material goods and concern about pollution. A more radical perspective views waste as a resource and an opportunity. The earthworm lives by consuming plant litter (wastes) converting it to humus improving the soil for itself, for soil microorganisms, and plants. Thus the earthworm, like all living things, is a part of a web, where the outputs of one are the inputs for another. From pattern to detail!
Principle 7: DESIGN FROM PATTERNS TO DETAILS
The first six principles tend to consider systems from the bottom-up perspective of elements, organisms, and individuals. The second six principles tend to emphasis the top-down perspective of patterns and relationships that tend to emerge by system self-organization and co-evolution.
From observation and pattern recognition we see that nature reveals branching patterns common to many systems. It helps us understand scale and ratios in nature. A tree usually has nine main branches and so do river systems. Mountain ranges and sand dunes, waves and leaves and even our capillaries, follow similar ratios of scale and branching patters.
The commonality of patterns observable in nature and society allows us to not only make sense of what we see, but adapt one pattern from one context and scale, to another. Pattern recognition is an outcome of the application of Principle 1: Observe and interact, and is the necessary precursor to the process of design.
The idea behind permaculture is the forest as a model for agriculture. While not new, this model offers the opportunity to apply one of the most common ecosystem models, to human land use.
Terms like stacking functions, vertical zones, polyculture, forest garden, edge-thinking, sacred land, water sheds, water and rivers, diversity, constants, resilience, redundancy, cycles and yields, inform design.
The use of zones of intensity/activity around an activity center such as a homestead, to locate elements and sub-systems, is an example of working from pattern to details.
Similarly environmental factors – the wild energies of sun, wind, flood, and fire - can be arranged in sectors around the same focal point. These sectors have both a bioregional and a site-specific character to make sense of a site and help organize appropriate design elements into a workable system.
Principle 8: INTEGRATE RATHER THAN SEGREGATE
In every aspect of nature, from internal workings of organisms to whole ecosystems, we find connections between things are as important as the things themselves. Thus the purpose of functional and self-regulating design, is placement of elements serving the needs and accepting products of other elements - a web of connections and biofeedback.
This principle focuses more closely on relationships that draw elements together in more closely integrated systems - improved methods of designing communities of plants, animals and people to gain benefits from these relationships: guild planting. Creating symbiosis. Diversity. Redundancy.
Correct placement of plants, animals, earthworks and other infrastructure, encourages a higher degree of integration and regulation without need for constant human input and corrective management. Allowing gravity to work for you - free energy to permeate design, provides elegant and cost-free solutions.
For example, by appropriately locating, scratching poultry under forage forests where they feed on the food forest itself, without direct input from the farmer, we can harvest litter to down-slope garden systems efficiently. The fertilized run-off can be part of the system. Of course the chickens provide many more functions including chicken tractor applications.
Herbaceous and woody weed species in animal pasture systems often build and improve soil contributing nitrogen, biodiversity, medicinal and other special uses. Appropriate rotationally grazed livestock can control weedy species without eliminating them and their value, pruning them as well as manuring the property.
But this agrarian example could serve in other systems design too. Permaculture and pattern understanding can help inform community and financial design. It is a design tool – a way of approaching design toward sustainability and higher yield.
Two statements in permaculture literature and teaching have been central:
* Each element performs many functions.
* Each important function is supported by many elements.
The connections, or relationships between elements of an integrated system, can vary greatly. Some may be predatory or competitive; others co-operative, or even symbiotic. But all relationships can be beneficial in building strong integrated systems or community. Permaculture strongly emphasizes building mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationships. A paradox?:
- We have a cultural disposition to see and believe in predatory and competitive relationships, and discount co-operative and symbiotic relationships, in nature and culture.
- Co-operative and symbiotic relationships will be more adaptive in a future of declining energy. Cooperation not competition is a prime ethic of permaculture.
Principle 9: USE SMALL AND SLOW SOLUTIONS
Systems should be designed to perform functions at the smallest scale practical and energy-efficient for that function. Human scale and capacity should be the yardstick for a humane, democratic and sustainable society.
In forestry, fast growing trees are often short-lived, while some apparently slow growing, but more valuable species, accelerate and even surpass fast species in their second and third decades. A small plantation of thinned and pruned trees can yield more total value than a large plantation without management. Understanding cycles and rhythms in nature, seeking niches in time and space, creates more long-term productivity.
Principle 10: USE AND VALUE DIVERSITY
The great diversity of forms, functions and interactions in nature and humanity are the source of evolving systemic complexity. The role and value of diversity in nature, culture and permaculture is complex, dynamic, and at times apparently contradictory. Diversity needs to be seen as balance and tension in nature, between variety and possibility on the one hand, and productivity and power on the other.
Monoculture is vulnerable to pests and diseases, and requires widespread use of toxic chemicals and fossil fuel energy to maintain itself. Inputs outnumber outputs, It is unsustainable.
Polyculture (the cultivation of many plant and/or animal species and varieties within an integrated system) is one of the most important and widely recognized applications of the use of diversity to reduce vulnerability to pests, adverse seasons and market fluctuations. Polyculture reduces reliance on market systems, and bolsters household and community self-reliance by providing a wider range of goods and services. Developing polyculture systems in proximity to population centers will increase the stability and resilience of those communities.
Principle 11: USE EDGES AND VALUE THE MARGINS
When the forest meets the field, one ecosystem rubs up against another creating a third ecosystem, which is more diverse, producing more yield. The same thing happens when communities are rubbed together, new bonds are created, there is cross-fertilization of ideas and talent that spawns new relationships. There is more life!
This principle works from the premise that the value and contribution of edges, the marginal and invisible aspects of any system, should not only be recognized and conserved, but expanded to increase the systems productivity and stability.
For example, increasing the edge between field and pond increases the productivity of both. Alley farming and shelterbelt forestry are systems where increasing edge between field and forest contributes to productivity.
Tidal estuaries are complex interfaces between land and sea - a great ecological trading market between two domains of life. The shallow water allows penetration of sunlight for algae and plant growth providing forage areas for fish and birds. Fresh water from catchment streams rides over the heavier saline water pulsing back and forth with the daily tides, redistributing nutrients and food for the teeming life. There are many lateral and horizontal edges.
Within every terrestrial ecosystem, the living soil, which may only be a few centimeters deep, is the edge, or interface between non-living mineral earth and the atmosphere. For all terrestrial life, including humanity, this is the most important edge of all. It is the fragile edge of life about as thick as the skin of an apple if an apple were the earth.
Only a limited number of hardy species can thrive in shallow, compacted and poorly drained soil. Deep, well-drained and aerated soil is like a sponge, a great interface that supports productive and healthy plant life. One of the central tenants of permaculture is to build soil.
Applying three-dimensional thinking to edges encourages more yield. Where the atmosphere meets the water and the mist between, are all edges. The edge is the transition point where one thing becomes the other.
Principle 12: CREATIVELY USE AND RESPOND TO CHANGE
Permaculture is concerned with the durability of natural living systems and human culture, but durability, paradoxically, depends on flexibility and change. Many stories and traditions have a theme: “in greatest stability lay the seeds of change”. At the cellular and atomic level, science shows that the solid and permanent is really a seething mass of energy and change. This is similar to the descriptions in various spiritual traditions.
In permaculture literature and practice, the acceleration of ecological succession within cultivated systems, is the most common expression of this principle. For example, the use of fast growing nitrogen fixing trees to improve soil, and provide shelter and shade for more valuable slow growing food trees, reflects an ecological succession process from pioneers to climax.
The progressive removal of nitrogen fixers for fodder and fuel, as the tree crop system matures, is a renewable yield and will encourage the forest to grow even stronger. The seed in the soil capable of regeneration after natural disaster or land use change provides insurance to re-establish the system in the future.
ends holmgren
The Principles of Permaculture Design: Bill Mollison
Author: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”
The principles of permaculture provide a set of universally applicable guidelines to design sustainable habitats. Distilled from multiple disciplines–ecology, energy conservation, landscape design, and environmental science. These principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. The following is a list of these principles.
1. RELATIVE LOCATION:
Components placed in a system are viewed relatively, not in isolation.
2. FUNCTION RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COMPONENTS:
Everything is connected to everything else. Create a web of life.
3. RECOGNIZE FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ELEMENTS:
Every function is supported by many elements.
4. RECUNDANCY:
Good design ensures all-important functions can withstand the failure of one or more elements. Design backups.
5. EVERY ELEMENT IS SUPPORTED BY MANY FUNCTIONS:
Each element we include is a system, chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
6. LOCAL FOCUS:
"Think globally - Act locally" Grow your own food, cooperate with neighbors. Community efficiency not self-sufficiency.
7. DIVERSITY:
As a general rule, as sustainable systems mature they become increasingly diverse in both space and time. What is important is the complexity of the functional relationships that exist between elements not the number of elements.
8. USE BIOLOGICAL RESOURCES:
We know living things reproduce and build up their availability over time, assisted by their interaction with other compatible elements. Use and reserve biological intelligence.
9. ONE CALORIE IN/ONE CALORIE OUT:
Do not consume or export more biomass than carbon fixed by the solar budget.
10. STOCKING:
Finding the balance of various elements to keep one from overpowering another over time. How much of an element needs to be produced in order to fulfill the need of whole system?
11. STACKING: Multilevel functions for single element (stacking functions). Multilevel garden design, i.e., trellising, forest garden, vines, groundcovers, etc.
12. SUCCESSION:
Recognize that certain elements prepare the way for systems to support other elements in the future, i.e.: succession planting.
13. USE ON-SITE RESOURCES:
Determine what resources are available and entering the system on their own and maximize their use.
14. EDGE EFFECT:
Ecotones (degrees of edge) are the most diverse and fertile area in a system. Two ecosystems come together to form a third which has more diversity than either of the other two, i.e.: edges of ponds, forests, meadows, currents etc.
15. ENERGY RECYCLING:
Yields from system designed to supply onsite needs and/or needs of local region.
16. SMALL SCALE:
Intensive systems start small and create a system that is manageable and produces a high yield.
17. MAKE LEAST CHANGE FOR GREATEST EFFECT:
The less change generated, the less embedded energy is used to endow the system.
18. PLANTING STRATEGY:
First natives, second proven exotics, third unproven exotics - carefully on small scale with lots of observation.
19. WORK WITH NATURE:
Aiding the natural cycles results in higher yield and less work. A little support goes a long way.
20. APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY:
The same principles apply to cooking, lighting, transportation, heating, sewage treatment, water and other utilities.
21. LAW OF RETURN:
Whatever we take, we must return every object must responsibly provide for its replacement.
22. STRESS AND HARMONY:
Stress here may be defined as either prevention of natural function, or of forced function. Harmony may be defined as the integration of chosen and natural functions, and the easy supply of essential needs.
23. THE PROBLEM IS THE SOLUTION:
We are the problem, we are the solution. Turn constraints into resources. Mistakes are tools for learning.
24. THE FIELD OF A SYSTEM IS THEORETICALLY UNLIMITED:
The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible is the limit of information and imagination of designer.
25. DISPERSAL OF YIELD OVER TIME:
Principal of seven generations. We can use energy to construct these systems, providing that in their lifetime, they store or conserve more energy that we use to construct them or to maintain them thereby building sustainable systems.
26. A POLICY OF RESPONSIBILITY TO RELINQUISH POWER:
The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system.
27. PRINCIPLE OF DISORDER:
Order and harmony produce energy for other uses. Disorder consumes energy to no useful end. Tidiness is maintained disorder. Chaos has form, but is not predictable. The amplification of small fluctuations.
28. ENTROPY:
In complex systems, disorder is an increasing result. Entropy and life force are a stable pair that maintain the universe to infinity.
29. METASTABILITY:
For a complex system to remain stable, there must be small pockets of disorder.
30. ENTELECHY:
Principal of genetic intelligence. i.e. The rose has thorns to protect itself.
31. OBSERVATION:
Protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless destructive labor.
32. OPPORTUNITY:
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.
33. PATIENCE:
Wait one year: (See #31,Observation, above)
34. GRAVITY:
Hold water and fertility as high (in elevation) on the landscape as possible. Its all downhill from there.
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