Permaculture

Permaculture is an approach to land administration and settlement profile that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a race of profile principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such(a) as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, as alive as community resilience. Permaculture originally came from "permanent agriculture", but was later adjusted to mean "permanent culture", incorporating social aspects. The term was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who formulated the concept in opposition to Western industrialized methods and in congruence with Indigenous or traditional knowledge.

Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management, sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. It shares numerous practices with agroforestry and agroecology, emphasizing their social, cultural, and economic contexts. Permaculture has been implemented and has gained widespread visibility throughout the world as an agricultural and architectural design system and as a guiding life principle or philosophy. Traditional and indigenous practices are highly valued in permaculture because they pretend been developed in perpetual dialogue with particular climate and soil conditions. In turn, the rise of permaculture has revalidated Indigenous knowledge in circles where it was ago devalued.

Permaculture uses creative design processes based on whole-systems thinking, considering any materials and energies in flow that affect or are affected by shown changes. In practical terms it means that before, for example, modifying overland water flow, one fully considers both upstream and downstream effects in the short and long terms. Or, when looking at a "problem", such(a) as brushy vegetation, one considers how removing or altering it will impact soil and wildlife, and how these interacting forces would evolve over time and space. When building a house, one takes into consideration breaking down the house.

Foundational ethics

The ethics on which permaculture builds are:

Mollison's 1988 formulation of the third ethic was restated by Holmgren in 2002 as “Set limits to consumption and reproduction, and redistribute surplus” and is elsewhere condensed to "share the surplus".

Permaculture emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It determines where these elements should be placed so they can supply maximum benefit to the local environment. Permaculture maximizes useful connections between components and synergy of thedesign. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is non on individual elements, but rather on the relationships among them. Properly done, the whole becomes greater than the statement of its parts. Permaculture seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and power to direct or determining input and maximize benefits through synergy.

Permaculture design is founded in replicating or imitating natural patterns found in ecosystems because these solutions create emerged through evolution over thousands of years and have proven to be effective. As a result, the execution of permaculture design will redesign widely depending on the region of the Earth it is for located in. Because permaculture's implementation is so localized and place specific, scientific literature for the field is lacking or not always applicable. Design principles derive from the science of systems ecology and the study of pre-industrial examples of sustainable land use. Permaculture draws from disciplines including organic farming, agroforestry, integrated farming, sustainable development, physics, meteorology, sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, engineering, and applied ecology.