The 7 Most Important Things to Know About Permaculture

Every so often, someone will come up to us and ask – So what’s so important about permaculture anyway? How is it better than conventional farming? And what’s the deal with a “permaculture lifestyle?”

These are the kinds of questions we love to answer! We’ve given the core points on our “What is Permaculture” overview page. But these questions dive below the basics into the eco-impact: how permaculture works as a design system, and how it answers the urgent needs of our culture today.

Here’s what we tell them…

More of a visual learner? Watch Rob’s video on this topic

1) Permaculture is a design system that uses ecosystem principles to meet human needs.

What does this mean? (see the full definition of permaculture HERE). 

We’re not just trying to meet human needs; we’re trying to do it in a way that actually enhances and sustains the health of the ecosystem. For example, modern community developments are designed without regard for the health of the surrounding ecosystem. Streams are hidden in culverts and stormwater is funnelled quickly off the properties, out to the sewer system, and away. The impact? Stormwater and sewage flood streets and basements when overloaded systems fail, while thousands of homeowners pay to spray potable water on lawns and gardens in the driest time of the year (often flouting local laws to do so). See the disconnect? 

Permaculture, on the other hand, sees human habitat as a part of the ecosystem. So the features of the land are identified and put to work as assets: stormwater, for example, is captured in swales and directed to the gardens for irrigation, or stored and released slowly to sustain plants against drought. The idea is to create a self-renewing, self-sustaining system, serving human needs while using nature’s own tactics to replenish the land.

Now, with Earth systems growing depleted, billionaires are dreaming of interstellar travel and terraforming Mars. But here’s the challenge: humans will need to replace all of the ecological functions we take for granted here on earth: recycling all of our water, growing all of our own food, producing or recycling our own oxygen, and creating enormous amounts of heat to live in space or on planets as cold as Mars.

All of these are things we take for granted on Earth!  It’s time to realise that Planet Earth is our only spaceship right now. We don’t really know how to live away from this planet, and we probably won’t for quite a long time.  

So permaculture re-visions all of our waste streams, all of our production streams, all of our requirements and needs as humans, both from a community level and a technical level, reshaping our role as responsible actors in the ecosystem.

2) Permaculture regards humans as part of the solution.

Everywhere you look, it seems, there’s a depressing verdict on humanity’s place in the world: “At best humans can be less bad, but we will always be destructive.” When you’re starting with this grim assumption, how can you take any positive action? 

But we keep coming back to the words of permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison: “Everything gardens.” 

What does that mean? Consider gardening as a way of altering your environment: humans aren’t the only species to do this. Wolves restore ecosystems by culling herd animals; beavers restore wetlands by building dams; grebes provide habitat for their prey with their floating nests.

 The list goes on and on: countless other species transform their surroundings in a beneficial way to create livable habitat. And if they can do it, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same! It’s all about knowing what to do, where to do it, and the right way to do it.

Here’s just one example – a Before and After shot of a burned-out cotton field. Because cotton isn’t food, there are no limits to the pesticides and herbicides that can be sprayed on it.

The photo on the left is the aftermath. See all those cracks in the ground? This is what happens to soil that’s lost all its carbon: it no longer has the ability to absorb water. So all that fine clay silt comes to the surface and seals the soil surface. Then, when the next rain comes along, the water rolls right off instead of sinking in. The land is effectively dead; seeds cannot be watered and will not grow.

Now take a look at the photo of the same acreage on the right: permaculture consultant Owen Hablutzel repaired this ecosystem with a skilled and appropriate use of keyline ploughing, using a non-inversion plough that creates microchannels under the soil. As a result, the water that couldn’t prime the system now sinks in and activates the existing seed bed with moisture, so suddenly plants can begin growing. As the plants grow, they reduce evaporation on the surface of the soil. As soil moisture increases, plant growth increases, which increases the movement of carbon into the soil. Just a 1% increase in soil carbon will increase the amount of water holding capacity on a hectare of land by about 166,000 litres or roughly 20,000 thousand gallons per acre.

So this example shows how a very small suture restored the landscape: there was no seed added into the system, no fertilizer, no compost teas or extracts. Just a little bit of water being allowed to infiltrate below the soil surface.

3)  Permaculture is a way to reframe the world in a positive light.

Permaculture is a design system based in positivism: in fact, one of the key concepts is that The Problem Is the Solution. How can that be?

To explain this, we need to dip into neuroscience for a moment. The prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain, is relatively new, evolutionarily speaking. Its rational processes are still easily overwhelmed by the older parts of our brain, which respond to fear, ensuring our survival with the primal fight/flight reflex.

Problem is, the problems we’re facing today are much more complex, and require more complex thinking skills than running away from ferocious predators. Now, there’s certainly plenty of evidence that humans are destructive, and it’s easy to point to this in an effort to motivate people to change through fear. But fear shuts down the thinking brain that we need to design strategic  solutions.

For example, if you’re a canoeist, you know that it’s important not to look at the rocks in the river. Instead, while you remain aware of them, you focus on finding the path through the rapids. So while it’s important to acknowledge that our planet, our ecosystems, have problems, we don’t focus or obsess on the problems. Instead, we focus on the solutions, the positive steps we can take.

This is part of the prime directive of permaculture: to take responsibility for our own actions and those of our children, to get our own house and garden in order to shelter and feed us. Which sounds selfish, but imagine if every one of us had secure shelter, a supply of food put by, access to renewable energy, a supply of harvested rainwater, and strong communities around ourselves – all the problems of our broken communities would disappear.

It’s not easy; the problems occupy so much of our cultural attention, and while solutions are being found and implemented, they’re hard to see! But in teaching the permaculture design course, we bring those solutions to the fore so our students can focus on them and realise that there are opportunities to change course.

4) Permaculture is a metric to define sustainability.

What does the word “sustainable” say about our expectations? If someone asked how your marriage was, and you said “Enh, it’s sustainable,” they’d feel pretty sorry for you, no? You don’t want a sustainable marriage – you want one that gets better with time. Sustainability is about sustaining or maintaining something as it is. Do we really want to sustain dead zones in the ocean, degraded rivers, depleted fields, and broken communities? Of course not. We’re not in a position to be sustainable right now; we need to restore things to health before we can sustain them.

Rob Avis builds an urban swale on the family’s Calgary homestead. Video HERE. 

So permaculture is an earth repair mechanism that helps us to fix systems and improve our own quality of life. We sequester CO2 because it puts carbon back into our soils, which sequesters more water, which makes more nutrient-dense food, which creates more habitat and resilience. By capturing and sinking the rainwater, we recharge the aquifers, leading to more available water for coming generations. By cleaning the water that comes onto our property, we ensure that the people downstream have clean water.

 We want our systems to increase resilience: to be prepared for the long haul instead of running out to get supplies “just in time” or living paycheck to paycheck. Our culture is built around “just in time” – communications, friendships, food, money. We don’t plan or prepare any more, because we’re all carrying around smartphones that let us make second-by-second decisions. We’re living faster, but not smarter. And permaculture helps us to change all of this.

 

5) Permaculture is a systems approach to design.

When you’re trying to create a self-contained, closed-loop system for your small urban homestead or your large acreage, you discover there are a lot of systems involved! There’s a lot of thinking and a lot of design – it gets complex really quickly.

One of the most effective ways to manage that complexity is by constraint, but you need to know what to constrain. One of the most useful constraints we’ve found is “Water, Access, Structures.” Water is central to life. It’s a master element on any property: if you don’t have it, you won’t be able to thrive; if you do have it and can manage a property properly, then the system operates almost effortlessly. So water is a great constraining mechanism.

Rob explains the concept of Water, Access, Structures.

Another constraining tool that we use is the land use bylaw: what’s legal in your jurisdiction versus what isn’t.  What does your local municipality allow you to do on your particular property?

 There are all sorts of other types of constraints: for example, your solar resource – how much sunlight does your property receive, and is it possible for you to collect enough sun?  Permaculture pioneer David Holmgren wrote in his latest book that on farms, sunlight is almost never a limiting factor, but the minute you get into urban or suburban areas, you’ve got houses around you; in older areas you’ve got large trees, and so the sun almost always becomes the challenging factor.

The scale of your property will often determine your constraints. So it’s really important to have a process to be able to constrain problems so that you come out with a solution that makes sense.

6) Permaculture is a set of solutions.

So permaculture is a toolbox or matrix of solutions — you just have to figure out which solution to apply at which particular place. For example, let’s look at wastewater. It’s generally thought of as a liability, with septic systems being buried underground and effectively forgotten for 30 years or so.

However, viewed through permaculture eyes, it becomes a stranded asset. Consider this: the world is facing a global phosphorus collapse. Right now phosphorus is mined to be applied to crops as one-third of the world’s NPK fertiliser combination, but that mined resource will give out in about 20-30 years, leading to the end of industrial agriculture as we know it today.

But the truth is – we have plenty of phosphorus, nitrogen, and tons of micronutrients, easily enough to support seven billion people, in the stranded asset of our wastewater systems. How can we put this to use? Think of plants that thrive on nutrient-dense water: coppice-able tree systems, for one. When you’re growing trees as a renewable source of energy, cutting them on a regular basis, you don’t need to worry about pathogens. And a lot of trees – for example, alder and willow — can be cut back and then sprout new shoots right away, providing a perennial source of firewood. 

So, imagine designing your house so that it uses a certain amount of thermal energy annually, and that that amount of thermal energy is equivalent to the amount of wood being fed by your wastewater tank. It’s a closed-loop system: every time you flush the toilet, you’re nourishing the trees that supply your thermal energy needs.

 

Coppiced trees in the Lower_Wood_Nature_Reserve, Gloucestershire, U.K., present since the last ice age.

And a coppice-able tree system can also serve as a snow harvesting mechanism, and a shelter belt, and bee and bird habitat, and solves an erosion issue — so all of a sudden now your wastewater fuels an enormous opportunity!

 So a permaculture perspective turns liabilities into opportunities. A lot of our graduates look at the liabilities of the world, saying, “Okay, how can we apply permaculture to these liabilities to create a livelihood that puts food on my table and pays my rent, while it also fixes the planet at the same time?” And there are literally thousands of stranded assets that they can put to productive use.

Permaculture isn’t just about designing your property. You also integrate it in what you do. So if you are currently a veterinarian, or a dog walker, or a psychologist, or a marketer —  it doesn’t matter what you do for a living. You can bring these ideas into what you currently do and change the paradigm. it’s all about how we look at problems as opposed to getting stuck in the problems.

7) Permaculture is a group of disciplines rolled into one. 

If you think about permaculture as a design modality, it’s architecture, it’s engineering, it’s wastewater management, it’s horticulture, it’s forestry, it’s community development, it’s resilience thinking, it’s water management. It’s all of these things brought into one.  Which ties in our last point: that you don’t do permaculture; you use it within what you do.  

You integrate all of these different ideas and modalities in the way you design everything. And yes, it is complex, but when you really get to the fundamental principles of what we’re doing with permaculture, things just fit together: it’s the way we should have been doing things all along.

There’s a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: revolution by design and invention.” And then he has another, similar quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

 Once we do that, a lot of the world’s problems – peak oil, climate change, food insecurity, et al – will start to disappear: ultimately, they’re massive symptoms of an aggregate of little problems.

That’s what we love about permaculture: its ability to diagnose problems and create opportunities. It’s only when a large number of us start to embrace these ideas that we’ll actually start to turn the boat in a different direction. 

That’s one of the main reasons why we’re so passionate about teaching our students to create resilience in their lives.

Want to Learn More? 

This post is a compilation of a video and writings by Verge Permaculture founder Rob Avis. Check out the full video on YouTube.

To learn more about permaculture, check out our Permaculture Primer course. And to stay connected with the community and receive tips and tricks on everything permaculture related, sign up for our newsletter.