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Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability

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That the world we now live in is unsustainable goes without saying. Our skyrocketing population puts enormous pressure on the productive and absorptive capacities of the land, outstripping the natural carrying capacity of the planet by some twenty percent (see Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel). In effect, we are stealing away the life of the planet and the life of future generations. As ever more fisheries collapse, forests shrink, rangelands deteriorate, soils erode, species vanish, temperatures rise, rivers run dry, water tables fall, ozone depletion expands and polar ice caps melt across the globe, the single most important question humanity has faced resonates ever louder: How can we live sustainably?

Amid the cacophony of scholarly and political debate surrounding this issue, the hushed emergence of permaculture has by and large gone unnoticed. Defined as the use of systems thinking and design principles to consciously design "landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs," the permaculture concept is nothing less than the science of sustainability. And since the joint publication of Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (now out of print) by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-seventies, permaculture has become a veritable movement - a legitimate answer to the environmental and agricultural crises which plague humanity. Unfortunately, for the past twenty-five years, those who wished to learn more about permaculture were limited to joining expensive seminars and workshops, thereby ensuring marginal public exposure. All of this has changed, though, with the publication of this book. Holmgren provides us with a no-nonsense guide to permaculture, accessible to laypersons and scholars alike.

If you are interested in moving away from consumer dependency and becoming a responsible productive person, this book is for you. The skills and ideas imparted here are not only necessary for those who seek to create a healthful, sustainable way of life, they are empowering. In my opinion, permaculture is the best tool we have with which to begin creating a viable, perhaps more-than-merely-sustainable future.

To get an idea of what permaculture actually looks like on the ground, check out Ecovillage Living, by Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson, and visit the Crystal Waters Permaculture Village website.

A very, very important book.

This book has rekindled my interest in Permaculture.

The author, David Holmgren, is the co-creator, with Bill Mollison of the
term "permaculture", and the co-author of the original permaculture
book, _Permaculture One_. Now, some 25 years after that seminal
book, Holmgren has written a timely and comprehensive synthesis that
brings permaculture principles together in an exiting new way.

The book highlights our place at a unique moment in history: at the peak
of the global oil production curve; at the beginning of the end of cheap
fossil energy. This is, for me, the book's most compelling motif: it
positions permaculture as a strategy for a future of inevitable "energy
descent". Although Holmgren hints that this energy descent may take any
number of horrific pathways, he appears to have chosen the term
"descent" as a hopeful alternative to collapse, crash, or dieoff.

Holmgren insightfully points out that is not just our reserves of fossil
fuel that we've been burning through. Since the Reagan/Thatcher years,
he claims, global capitalism has been on a frenzy of job cutting and
"just-in-time" inventory reduction. This amounts to a destruction of
the embedded intelligence and a severe draw-down of the capital stocks
of our institutions: a severe loss of embedded energy. Furthermore, he
worries that due to privatization and short-term bottom-line thinking,
maintenance on our built-environment and physical infrastructure has been

neglected: another huge loss of embedded energy.

On a hopeful note, Holmgren compares this situation to a forest fire: as
the conflagration of global capitalism burns through its huge pulse of
embedded energy, the time will be ripe for pioneers to take root and
produce a flush of new growth. It is a moment of high potential for
systemic change, and Holmgren's book hopes to provide "Principles and
Pathways" to seed and guide that change.

The subtitle of this book includes the phrase "Beyond Sustainability".
It is a well-established insight of permaculture that sustainability is
not enough: in a world that is already degraded, we need to achieve an
excess yield beyond sustainability that we can feed back into the great
work of restoration. Holmgren's contribution to this area is to point
out is that it is hard to even give meaning to the term "sustainability"
while we are in the midst of a dramatic energy descent with constantly
declining energy availability. We must, of course, aim for a soft
landing and a smooth transition to a sustainable future but our
immediate problem is to safely negotiate the descent itself.

All this is in addition, of course, to Holmgren's wise and fresh take on the more traditional
subject matter of permaculture design. This book is a must-read, equal
in stature to Mollison's _Permaculture: a Practical Guide for a
Sustainable Future_.

Love this book! The principles introduced are part of the multifaceted permaculture solution for many of the greatest challenges that our civilization is facing. Eye opening, but not fear-inspiring.

David Holmgren can see distant horizons. His renown genius brings post-peak (world energy production) paradigms into our view of imminent landscapes and humans action. Readers should be warned that the issues David raises could be very disturbing. You should first seriously evaluate the stability of your emotions and metabolism. I would not recommend this book to someone feeling socially isolated, unsupported, urban discontent, emotionally vulnerable, or terrified by global scales and city speeds.

The radical aspect of David's approach is to recognize the (Leibniz-Lotka-Volterra-H.T.Odum) 4th energy law of maximum power efficiency as a sociogeobiophysical design principle. David's thought can be characterised as the application of this law to humane terraformations. And in this regard he is quite a thinker.

In this book David aims at an all-encompassing statement of perennial ethics. And in this regard I can't help feeling that messiah Holmgren is premature in self-publication. David is surprisingly ignorant of moral philosophy, and does not appear to feel any obligation to read any of the basic texts or discourses in the area. This just doesn't feel right. Especially since David's polyvision seems confused by higher-order complexities of Nature; such as cities, Nation states, transnational organizations and televisions.

With regard to all scales of government policy formation, he has very little to say and he refers to no models. Perhaps this is because he is living off the land sustainability, and isn't afforded the time to read more widely? Whatever the case I feel very uncomfortable about it, and about him referring to me as an authority on other matters.

On the one hand the work stands as an important indicator for smaller-scale post-industrial organization. On the other hand an EMERGY-literate Holmgren would give greater weighting to his ecological conspiracy. In the mean time deeper ecosystem philosophers should master H.T. Odum's 'Ecological and General Systems' - the source.