Permaculture Design
Why is Permaculture needed to address the immediate needs of the world - now and beyond?
In this page we will try to clarify several things that cloud the space of Sustainability and Permaculture. Read the whole page to get informed or read the specific sections below:
- Permaculture: Defined
- Permaculture And The Sustainable Future of humans on Earth
- Permaculture Design Certificate Course (PDC)
- Permaculture And The Sustainable Future of humans on Earth
- Key criteria of Permaculture Design
- Permaculture Highlights to be noted
- Our Focus At Urban Hijau
PERMACULTURE: DEFINED
Permaculture in simple words deals with a clear purpose. The ability of humans to live sustainably permanently on earth. Meaning while the current generation of humans can live appropriately so future generations will also have a chance to do the same within the ecology.
The current way we are living, we are constantly over utilizing the resources and polluting the earth at the same time with too much waste.
The current way we live is broken!
It will lead us to have more and more problems either directly or indirectly in our lives. The symptoms of these are apparent in the world – things like climate change, social chaos, food insecurity and more.
The founders of Permaculture, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren started the journey at the root of the problem – design. Permaculture coined from “Permanent agriculture” was developed to use the scientific method to design sustainable systems.
Later the ideas from Masanobu Fukuoka were also incorporated to mean “permanent culture”.
And that is one of the critical elements of the design that one must always remember. Once the definition and purpose of design is clear, it does not matter what principles can be used to effectively design it though twelve guiding principles have been given to start the process.
Permaculture is NOT here to stop all the progress and live a lifestyle which must be backward. But Permaculture IS about understanding our real NEEDS – wholesome food, shelter and connection in a way which gives every living creature a chance to thrive within the ecosystem. Through careful planning and resource use we can create ABUNDANCE for all our needs.
So what is Permaculture?
When we use Permaculture to design we start with the priorities in life – air, water, food and then shelter – taking care of each other.
Talking about these priorities, we must firstly realize that Permaculture can also be used to design many “invisible structure” besides the physical. Be it designing a kitchen or a flow of people in a museum, a landscape design of a garden or a layout of a village or a city; all these can be done through careful observation and utilization of the design method.
It is equally important to realize here that while the problems relating to water scarcity, air pollution and food production seem dire, many of the problems root causes are in the invisible structures that govern the life of humans today.
Having said that, the simplest action that one can take is to step up an grow and secure the wholesome nutrition for ourselves and our community.
Consumption is what we are all used to do. Cities are literally just places with monstrous appetite for consumption. But with production – especially “ethically designed production“, we can all make difference!
With a single good action, we can make an impact and build a pure connection with the natural system at the same time. This has a spillover effect on several levels and the community starts to restructure itself from the very basic fabrics of our sustainable existence – from waste management, soil building to lower carbon footprint – though a better measurement would be needed in a more sustainable system.
Permaculture Design Certificate Course (PDC)
What is the PDC?
If you have heard of Permaculture chances are that you have also heard about the Permaculture Design Certificate Course or simply the PDC.
Permaculture Design Certificate Course is a two week course mainly based on the Permaculture Manual. While originally the course was meant to be longer, but in order to allow more people to join it was condensed into the two weeks.
There tends to be a bit of confusion about the PDC so here are a few things to clarify:
- Anyone who does a PDC can teach the PDC. BUT it is recommended that participants get at least a few years of experience before teaching. Most teachers work like that.
- The PDC is meant to be a theoretical course. Yes you may learn about composting or if the event is held at a permaculture site, you get to observe several concepts.
- The main purpose of the PDC is NOT to learn how to do things, but to learn how to think about doing things. Its Design. You can use several techniques which work but without proper integration of elements the design can fail.
- The PDC does cover all climatic conditions. While we may only live in one specific climatic zone, we can only become sustainable i the whole world will become sustainable. It cannot happen in only area.
- Lastly the PDC is a boat with holes. We all have to continue to learn and close the holes else risk having the boat sink. Learning and applying appropriate tools and methods in social settings, business models, political setup and culture can vary from place to place and needs to be addressed appropriately.
If you are interested to host a Permacuture Design Certificate Course at your site with a trainer, here is a great resource for your to get to know the ins and outs of how to arrange it. (Link to Gios article)
The Standard Permaculture Course covers the following topics which are mainly from the Permaculture Manual:
Topic list from Murujan website
There are many many free courses available online as well. It is great to start one of the courses in a slow and consistent manner as a start if one doesn’t have the time to commit. But when earliest you can take out the time to do a full PDC it is highly recommended to take it.
The two weeks of group engagement and jumping into a new world which may start as depressing as we find out about the truth of the chaos but moves quickly into the hopeful action that we can all collectively do to make the world truly sustainable. The experience itself is worth the time.
Permaculture And The Sustainable Future of humans on Earth
There are so many hot topics and trendy words that are being thrown around the world with the aim for us to become more sustainable. Why is Permaculture different from all of these?
Besides these there are more topics that keep coming like ESG and various other reports which focus on specifics of where we currently are and what is ‘trendy’ out there to gather enough attention to make people take action.
Sometimes these systems are very good at addressing those issues but often times they are either too vague for people to link themselves with.
The question remains – With so many systems of management and measurement tackling the crisis that exists how can we make sense of it all?
Well as Geoff Lawton explains it Permaculture is like a wardrobe and you can place all different systems in it if applicable.
For example when dealing with sustainable agriculture, we can learn from various discipline and incorporate the correct climate analog to implement the right strategies. Essentially when people discuss the difference between syntropic agriculture, agroforestry or even biodynamic farming – we can place all these systems within hangers inside the wardrobe and use them when needed.
Similarly if we are designing currency systems as have been done through various local communities currencies, we can learn from the books of complementary currencies and even cryptocurrencies and learn specific strategies of what can be applied.
The key is that we only need to understand the fundamentals which are found abundantly in all natural systems. We learn the patterns from them and apply that to the highest level of design that we can. Not just thinking of the now but for a hundreds of years ahead.
Key criteria of Permaculture Design
Some key ways that Permaculture design is used to make a system sustainable for the long run are the following. There are more areas of design but these specifically help guide the criteria for design from a long term perspective.
Resilience
Resilience is the the ability of the system to continue functioning even when unusual and extreme external change and shocks may come.
For example the locals in a village in Malaysia hive houses built on stills. For the most part maybe there are no floods and all is well. But the preparations are made for the once in a hundred year flood. Similarly, knowing the extremities of rainfall, drought, fires or any other factor that may effect a system needs to be understood and designed for.
Regenerative
The need for ‘regenerative’ only comes when ‘sustainable’ is defined partially as “the capacity to endure”. Many organizations use the word partially to mean the ability to produce something constantly or some other twist.
As we have earlier explained the maintenance and rebuilding of the same system again are critical to the success of and truly sustainable design.
Regenerative systems help us address this situation and more.
Our current situation is not great. Just staying where we are is not enough. We need to also ‘fix’ things and make them better.
Thus regenerative systems design aims at improving the system from how we found it, and do it in perpetuity.
For example, much of the earths top soil is lost due to conventional agricultural practices. Not only do we aim to create a system which produces a yield but we aim to design a system which constantly builds soil year after year.
Similarly we need to design systems to fill up our aquafers, increase the water table, increase the biodiversity, increase the worm count in the soil and so on.
Energy Accounting:
A key theme as designers is that we design systems to produce more energy than they consume, enough surplus to maintain and replace those systems over their lifetime. If an element is very critical then at least the element should produce enough to maintain itself else we will be in perpetual loss.
For example, our current agricultural systems need upwards of 15 times the energy that is produced by the yield. This situation by default is unsustainable. We need to reverse the ratios. For places which do not depend on excess energy fueled by petrol and the likes, like Cuba the ratio is in favor of 1 to 5 giving us more than when we put in.
Ethical
As mentioned earlier, the ethics of Permaculture design is critical. We need to make sure our systems follow earth care, people care and fair share.
Which we solve efficiency problems and improve what we don’t enforce people to follow a certain path. There are many factors that go beyond efficiencies like culture and faith.
We ultimately need to take care of people. If people are taken care of, they will no end up destroying what is naturally available.
Permaculture Highlights to be noted
Among the several areas that are covered under the Umbrella of Permaculture, we feel that some of these topics should be highlighted as the relevance and importance they have to our communities today.
SOIL
A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
NUTRITION
Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.
ENERGY
Using small scale and decentralized renewable sources, we recycle the energies present & capture incoming energies.
"Permaculture
is the conscious ethical design science based on natural patterns, our heritage & appropriate technology to establish diverse, stable and resilient ecosystems"
mby
WATER
We never know the wealth of water till the well is dry.
WASTE
It is in the shelter of each other that people live.
CLIMATE
Deliberate and comprehensive focus on local adaptation planning on climate resilience to sustainable systems.
Our Focus At Urban Hijau
With so much to do we have to start with a first step.
As explained in detail in our site page, we started of with the knowledge from the PDC to find out what was possible within an abandoned housing lot.
Focusing on what needed to be done, our group came together to find our priority that was important and needed to be addresses.
As the Director of Urban Hijau Irfan says “I want my kids to know where their food comes from”
Hence our journey began to produce healthy food for ourselves and share with others what we can. From awareness building to giving food to the needy and training we have surely learnt a lot and continue to do what we can.
We can explain our efforts into a few simple steps:
- Grow food – we eat what we grow and share the rest with others
- We sell our produce every Sunday Morning at the farm and have our regular customers come.
- We try to send food aid to the needy at least once or twice a week. Giving fresh vegetable to them means so much to us and them.
- We train and help others grow as well so they can do it for themselves.
- Finally we help them with establishing the farms so they can go beyond just survival and make a livelihood for themselves.
To learn more about what we do, check out these other pages:
- Our site
- Programs