What is Permaculture?

 

When first asked this question, I feel as though I should rush to my favourite books and websites to quote the experts on this. Certainly there are principles that govern permaculture philosophy and many authors have written extensively on how one should approach the concept of permaculture. However, it really is very simple.

 

Permaculture is, permanent cultivation.

 

In order to understand why "permanent cultivation" has become so important we need to understand a little about agriculture and the history of humanity.

 

Nature has evolved over billions of years, perfectly integrated systems that are self-sustaining, self-contained and perfectly adapted to the resources (or lack of resources) that they have available to them. Humanity was once a part of these systems. We hunted and gathered. We took nothing more than we needed to consume and our waste products were returned to the environment. We followed the seasons. What little farming took place was transitional and non-intrusive, even today we can see elements of these practices in more primitive societies.

 

Modern agriculture sprung up in the Middle East around 10000 years ago. Grain that had been harvested from the wild was sown deliberately and animals were housed. This allowed for people to stay put and feed themselves through the winter when naturally harvested food were less abundant. Houses were built, then towns and cities and the rest is literally history. This cultivated food took less effort and allowed our kind to pursue greater things. Art, literature, government, social structure and associated power struggles. Agriculture is perhaps the most important technology to have ever been discovered.

 

Early agricultural systems were simple and still heavily revolved around the resources they had at hand. For example, little was known about the biological and nutritional needs of crops (from a scientific view) until the 18th and 19th centuries. It is around this time that the technology began to change, as it did in many areas. The industrial revolution gave us machines that could do a vast amount of work in short periods. Fertiliser technologies were developed - first natural guano, mined from islands in newly discovered land and once these resources disappeared, synthetic fertilisers evolved.

 

Technology evolved to combat pests and diseases and these new technologies were welcomed as a way to ensure crops flourished and people were fed and always guaranteed a harvest. Tougher varieties of crops were bred to be more resilient to pests, diseases, drought and flood.

No longer was the small holder valued as viable. Agriculture was going global. Massive companies grew and could use these new technologies of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and genetically modified crops to plant on mass, mono crops, all designed to be machine planted, harvested and shipped around the world on a scale unimaginable to those simple farmers who threw wheat seeds on freshly dig ground more than 10000 years ago.

 

Masses upon masses of virgin forest were cleared to make way for the huge cropping systems and with the forest went the humans who had lived harmoniously with nature for thousands of years. They would be dragged, lulled, seduced and tricked into giving up native lands and their cultures, many of which respected and revered the land.

And why not? Seemingly we can feed the world and end starvation with this technology. Not to mention make a few people very wealthy! Business is business after all…

But something went wrong. Lands that had sustained forest for millions of years could not sustain these crops for more than a few years. No matter how much fertiliser and pesticide could be dumped onto the earth, the earth would not produce. It dried out, salted up and blew away in the wind. Kalimantan was the proposed sight of the well-meaning Million Acres Rice Project, destined to feed South East Asia. Kalimantan burned for decades as the rich, highly diverse rainforests made way for single cropping systems. A rainforest growing in peat, 12 meters deep in some places seemed like the most fertile place on the planet. Once the forest were gone, the peat, with nothing to hold its moisture, turned to dust and left behind nothing but the ancient clay subsoils. Where once stood great forest, stands baron land, unsuitable for rice and unsuitable for most things but the dreaded palm oil stands.

 

This story is not alone. In our own country, soils have become polluted, contaminated, salinized and eroded by the determined corporate farmer who will force the earth to crop at any cost. Great rivers have been drained and diverted to force arid lands to push up more and more.

Clearly these practices are not sustainable and starvation is set to be a major problem in the near future for billions of earth’s inhabitants. We need another solution.

 

Permaculture is the solution. Permanent cultivation. If forests could sustain themselves for millions of year without input from outside systems, then perhaps this is the technology we should adapt for our own agricultural systems. Do as the forest does - permanently cultivate. Create systems that mimic nature.

 

First and foremost is the concept of sustainability. Agricultural systems need to be sustainable if they are to continue to produce. Forests do this by recycling nutrients through complicated ecosystems that rely on a vast variety of life from the smallest microbe to the highly evolved vertebrates. There are unique relationships between all living things and it is vital to understand these relationships if we hope to recreate sustainable ecosystems. You will not find mono crops often in nature and there is a reason for this and that is, that without input from other living organisms, systems will not be able to recycle nutrients enough to sustain themselves.

 

So there it is. Permaculture, not a hippy buzz word or a new style of garden but a real and achievable solution to the failed agricultural systems currently in place.