Earth Care, Future Care, People Care, Something Else

Go back to the fundamentals…

This quote seems more applicable today than ever before:

“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex,
the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”

― Bill Mollison

In the 20 years since my own permaculture design course, I am reminded again and again to return to the basics of permaculture design. It’s the “chop wood, carry water” kind of simplicity that I find comforting.

Permaculture offers a holistic approach to thriving and living that extends far beyond gardening. At its core are three foundational ethics that guide all permaculture practices: Care for the Earth, Care for People, and Care for the Future (often called “Fair Share” or “Return of Surplus”). Within this ethical framework, there are some key practices.

Care for the Earth

The first ethic recognizes our responsibility to protect and nurture natural ecosystems. This ethic is first because without it, we cannot meet any of the other needs.

  • Am I improving the life in the soil around me?
  • Am I increasing the biodiversity and capacity of the Earth around me to sustain itself?
  • Do I know how to use the plants and resources around me sustainably to meet me own needs?

Building Healthy Soil

Healthy soil is the foundation of all permaculture systems. This involves:

  • Composting organic matter to create nutrient-rich humus
  • Practicing no-till or minimal tillage techniques to preserve soil structure
  • Using mulch to protect soil, retain moisture, and suppress weeds
  • Incorporating diverse microorganisms through compost teas and biofertilizers

Creating Biodiversity

Biodiversity creates resilient ecosystems that resist pests and disease:

  • Planting polycultures rather than monocultures
  • Including native plants that support local wildlife
  • Creating habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and other organisms including water features and nesting spaces.
  • Establishing food forests with multiple vegetation layers

Water Conservation and Management

Water-wise practices include:

  • Capturing and storing rainwater through swales, ponds, and tanks
  • Using drip irrigation and other efficient watering methods
  • Designing landscapes that slow, spread, and sink water
  • Creating microclimates that reduce evaporation and water needs

Care for People

The second ethic focuses on meeting human needs sustainably and equitably.

  • Am I caring for my own well-being? We’ve inherited a number of stressors in our lives and between generations. It is important for us to act from a place of rest and capacity.
  • How am I doing at caring for my family?
  • My community and the communities I interact with?

Sustainable Shelter

Human habitation can be designed to work with nature. Most likely we will be adapting existing structures. Whenever possible, we want to be:

  • Building with natural, local, and low-impact materials
  • Designing passive solar homes that require minimal external energy
  • Integrating living spaces with productive landscapes
  • Creating comfortable microclimates through strategic planting

Food (and Water) Security and Sovereignty

Access to healthy food and clean water is a fundamental human right:

  • Growing diverse, nutritious foods using organic methods
  • Saving and sharing seeds to preserve genetic diversity
  • Creating food systems that require minimal external inputs
  • Teaching food production, preservation, and preparation skills

Community Building

Strong communities are resilient communities:

  • Establishing community gardens and food forests
  • Creating skill-sharing networks and workshops
  • Fostering intergenerational knowledge transfer
  • Supporting local economies through farmers’ markets and CSAs

Care for the Future

The third ethic acknowledges our responsibility to future generations and the equitable distribution of resources.

Reducing Waste and Closing Loops

Creating systems where “waste” becomes a resource:

  • Practicing the 5 Rs: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle
  • Converting “waste” streams into useful products (humanure, greywater systems)
  • Designing for durability and repairability
  • Implementing regenerative practices that build rather than deplete resources

Energy Conservation and Renewable Sources

Moving beyond fossil fuels:

  • Maximizing energy efficiency in homes and systems
  • Using appropriate renewable technologies like solar, wind, and micro-hydro
  • Designing systems that require minimal energy inputs
  • Creating energy storage solutions for resilience

Seed Saving and Heritage Preservation

Safeguarding biological and cultural heritage:

  • Maintaining seed libraries of open-pollinated varieties
  • Documenting traditional ecological knowledge
  • Passing down sustainable practices to younger generations
  • Protecting land through conservation easements and trusts

Integration Through Design

What makes permaculture unique is how these practices are woven together through thoughtful design. Permaculture design principles—like obtaining a yield, using and valuing diversity, and catching and storing energy—provide the framework for implementing these ethics in practical ways.

The most effective permaculture systems address all three ethics simultaneously. For example, a well-designed food forest cares for the earth by building soil and creating habitat, cares for people by providing nutritious food and medicine, and cares for the future by sequestering carbon, cleaning water, and preserving biodiversity.

By centering these three ethics in our design decisions, permaculture offers a pathway toward truly sustainable and regenerative living that benefits all life on Earth—now and for generations to come.

So, at the end of the day, I look at what I have accomplished. Is the soil a little better today? Is there capacity to hold water appropriately in the landscape? Did I see a new species or old friends? Did I harvest something from the garden? Have I interacted with my loved ones in a positive way? Have I done something to help my community or helped those who help others in their communities?

The solutions really are simple.

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design definition
Earth Care, Future Care, People Care

Who Created “Permaculture”?

Who created "permaculture"? Where did it start?

In this series of introduction to permaculture articles, I wanted to layout the basics. So here we are looking at the origin of permaculture. In the last one, I shared my definition of permaculture. There, I said it is "an ethical system of design that integrates humans with the natural world." There are hundreds of definitions of permaculture, and that makes it stronger.

Still, the system of design I refer to had a point of origin. Two brilliant and colorful characters, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren met when both were involved in university in Tasmania in 1972. Their months-long conversation critiquing industrial agriculture and the Green Revolution led them to the ideal of "permanent agriculture." 

Their synthesis of observed indigenous wisdom and practice, systems thinking, and the new understandings of ecological science led to not only an understanding of the damage industrial agricultural systems were wreaking in a globalizing world, but the impact on culture and a process for undoing the damage. This design process is grounded in the three ethics (Care of the Earth, Care of People, and Care of the Future). The process also guides us to mimic the natural patterns found in any particular place. All culture begins in nature. 

In practical terms, this means permaculture relies heavily on restoring perennial plant systems using new combinations of productive, high-yielding species. Tending landscapes using these strategies reinvigorates the systems indigenous humans created and tended around the world throughout our history as a species.

And, there was precedent in academic and scientific circles as well. J. Russell Smith had published a book on Tree Crops (1929) in the horticultural ferment of the 1920's, and Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution (1975) was spreading about the same time that Permaculture One (1978) was published.  

monarch on hand

What came before permaculture? 

meadowsweet in bloom

As I mentioned, indigenous humans around the planet and throughout time created systems of tending the landscape. Some were more successful than others (three previous civilizations failed in China according to the archeological data). In fact, I've come to believe that any human dependent on the land they have access to and with enough resourcefulness time to experiment will come up with many of the strategies and techniques utilized in permaculture design. For example, weir systems harvesting from the tides are very similar between the Haida of the Pacific Northwest and those found on ancient British coasts.

From a more recent experience, my own grandfather developed gardens and systems in his many garden farms in the 1970s-90s. Despite his poverty and lack of education, he developed massive gardens at multiple sites that incorporated trees, shrubs, annual crops, hoop houses, poultry and rabbits. His plantings were on contour and used the light and microclimates to advantage. He used deep mulch to control weeds and keep pathways clear. He heated his home with scrap wood from the local sawmill, canned a massive amount of food. There was cold storage on a north-facing porch. Water was tucked away in gallon jugs, in case the well went dry. We foraged for nuts, mushrooms, wild medicines, and berries regularly. 

There is a lot, looking back, that came from trial and error. His awareness of what was happening in his gardens (all five of them stretched over the county) was amazing. Frequently he would pause to show me some plant he'd imported and grown for the first time. 

I am fairly certain he never heard of permaculture. A deeply conservative man, he likely wouldn't have been a Mother Earth News reader either. 🙂 That didn't stop him from being connected to the Earth and the cycles of creation and tending implied in permaculture. 

Personally, I believe we all need to re-develop our relationship to the Earth (hence Touch the Earth), and to live in relationship to that Earth in a way that is mutually healing. In my journeys, I've connected with many others who share this perspective.

How did it spread?  

Permaculture spread initially through publications. There was Permaculture One, then Permaculture Two, then The Designers Manual, then came the Introduction to Permaculture. By this point, Mollison had gone around the world planting the system among likely candidates.

The first international permaculture convergence (IPC) happened in the early 1980s. The IPC agreed to a standard curriculum for a permaculture design course by the mid-1980s. This meant permaculture people around the planet had a common foundation for sharing ideas. From there, permaculture courses and institutes have grown to bring an understanding and practice to hundreds of thousands of people. 

In North America the first courses were in 1982 and 1983. Mollison essentially said, if you've taken the course go teach. Amazing projects came out of those initial courses. Slowly into the 1990's more teachers and teaching teams formed. By the time I took my own course in 2005, permaculture was still largely unheard of. North American permaculture has been weedy and wild. Still, more people are at least familiar with the term and have a sense of what permaculture is. More education is needed--and a lot more implementation. 

From my perspective, the permaculture design course is an onramp for people from mainstream society to a better future. It's just the beginning of a cultural shift. There are other doorways to that shift, but permaculture design has a lot of tools in the toolbox. There is a great deal of potential for building bridges between people who experience the world in radically different ways, but find a common vision of where they want to go. 

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