2. Properly defining and orienting permaculture
is of prime importance in its being
appropriately applied. I've found it to be a
very useful personal exercise.
Doing so prevents me from straying too far
from its practical origins and helps to keep it
from being transformed into some kind of
utopian, escapist ideal.
3. First referencing Bill Mollison's definition
(taken from the Designer's Manual):
"Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the
practical conscious design and maintenance of
agriculturally productive ecosystems which have
the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural
ecosystems."
"It is the harmonious integration of landscape and
people providing their food, energy, shelter, and
other material and non-material needs in a
sustainable way."
4.
As defined by Bill himself, permaculture
developed and emerged as "a response to
a perceived social problem".
5. Permaculture, as a design system, attempts to
integrate fabricated, natural, spatial, temporal,
social, and ethical parts (components) to achieve a
functional whole.
To do so, it concentrates not on the components
themselves, but on the relationships between
them, and on how they function to assist each
other.
It is in the arrangement of parts that design has its
being and function, and it is the adoption of a
purpose which decides the direction of design.
6. Permaculture is concerned with the institutional
and functional design of the dynamic
infrastructure provided by the natural world in
the form of ecosystem services.
We are given a concrete means of intelligently
managing natural capital in a way that
strengthens it while supplying our needs in an
ethical, conscious manner.
7. Ecosystem Services:
Provisioning services
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food (including seafood and game), crops, wild foods, spices
water
pharmaceuticals, biochemicals, and industrial products
energy (hydropower, biomass fuels)
Regulating services
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carbon sequestration and climate regulation
waste decomposition and detoxification
purification of water and air
crop pollination
pest and disease control
8. Ecosystem Services (cont.):
Supporting services
• nutrient dispersal and cycling
• seed dispersal
• Primary production
Cultural services
• cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspiration
• recreational experiences (including ecotourism)
• scientific discovery
9. Our practical goal is to create designs that selfregulate/self-manage - just like ecosystems do.
Without pollutants. Without unnecessary extra
work.
The purpose of a functional & self-regulating
design is to place elements or components in
such a way that each serves the needs, and
accepts the products, of other elements.
10.
Bill Mollison's Permaculture Principles:
'Enough' is the key principle of wise resource use.
Work with nature not against it.
The problem is the solution or see solutions not problems.
Make the least change for the greatest possible effect.
The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited.
Everything gardens.
Everything works both ways.
Design to accelerate succession and evolution.
Use relative location.
Each important function is supported by many elements
(components).
11. Bill Mollison's Permaculture Principles:
Each element (component) performs many functions, or
Use everything to its highest capacity.
Bring food production back to the cities.
Help make people self-reliant.
Increase diversity and so increase stability.
Co-operation not competition.
12. IMPORTANT FACTOR TO CONSIDER:
The CONTEXT in which permaculture is being
applied is critical. And I'm not simply referring to
the physical, geographical, topographical, climatic
contexts.
It's going to mean different things to different
people depending on who you are, where you are
and where you would like to go.
13. It's very personal. The reasons for being drawn to
permaculture are driven by a variety of factors.
For some, it's concern for the environment, for
others it's economic, or political, or social - or,
more likely, a combination of all of these factors.
All of them are closely related. None of them
exist in a vacuum or in isolation.
14. The Prussian military thinker Karl von Clausewitz was quoted as
saying:
"War is not an independent phenomenon, but the
continuation of politics by different means."
A couple of useful corollary statements easily follow
(attributed to the American dissident thinker Michael Ruppert):
"Politics is a continuation of Economics by different
means."
"Economics is a continuation of Energy by different means."
15. Classical physics defines energy as the ability to do work.
Money REPRESENTS the ability to do work. Fossil fuels
FURNISH the ability to do work. Quite alot of it - and, for the
moment, relatively cheaply when one accounts for the finite
nature of its supply in relation to what it facilitates.
Before the advent of fossil fuel (and modern finance), the
ability to do work was represented by the possession of
human chattel - or slaves.
History - in its politics, economics, and social development can be condensed into the unfolding of how our human
needs are provided for and subsequently how wealth is
generated.
16. From that perspective, permaculture stands as a
wholly revolutionary concept in form and function
in what it can potentially provide us with.
It would be tragic if it were allowed to be made
into another alternative lifestyle affectation.
Or some sort of utopian, escapist fantasy which
maginalizes itself by remaining at the fringes,
alienating those who need it most.
17. The modern era - the Industrial Age - is synonymous
with the the Oil Age. One doesn't exist without the
other.
Viewing our present world through that lens, it
becomes quite easy to understand the state of
things.
Given the finite nature of the lifeblood of the
modern world, one can do nothing but concede that
the economics and politics driving it cannot
continue.
18. As Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisers under American Presidents Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford, once said:
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
"Economists are very good at saying that something
cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when
it will stop."
We are all in some way, shape or form, implicated in
these statements. We're all affected by this reality.
19. Ultimately, we all have to answer a couple of questions
given the aforementioned:
How do we best supply our needs?
And who determines how that question is answered?
These are longstanding historical dilemmas requiring
practical solutions.
Our collective sociopolitical/socioeconomic situation is
dictated by how those questions are answered.
This lies at the heart of what drove the formation and
development of permaculture in its ethics and practice.
20. The "Hi Lo-Tech" integrated design methodology
embodied by permaculture will become an
essential tool in formulating the vision of a postindustrial, post-oil world and what it NEEDS to
look like in order for it to be viable.
Question: How exactly did Detroit become postindustrial, anyway? What are the "perceived
social problems" in the case of Detroit?
