Designed Visions - Sustainability through Permaculture - Courses, Design and Consultancy

Permaculture is about working with nature to make a better world for us all. By studying patterns in the natural world, we can derive for ourselves, a set of guiding principles. Permaculture design uses these principles to develop integrated systems to provide for our needs of food, shelter, energy & community in ways that are healthy & efficient. Through Permaculture design we can improve the quality and productivity of our individual lives, our society & our environment.

Permaculture has an ethical basis:

• Earthcare - Enabling all life systems to continue & increase.

• Peoplecare - enabling access to the resources people need for a good quality of life.

• Fairshare - Voluntary limits to population and consumption; to share resources for Earthcare & Peoplecare.

Permaculture is a way of designing systems, to maximise outputs from minimal inputs. While it can be applied to almost anything that we do, it is most commonly at present applied to farming & gardening. Our current systems are very energy-intensive, either through the heavy use of machinery, fossil fuels, chemicals or manual labour. Not only are these unsustainable in energy terms, but they are also rapidly degrading our soils & in turn the food that we grow upon them. While natural systems cycle back nearly one hundred important elements into the soil, NPK fertilisers put back three! The end result of such practices is plain to foresee. We need to start using alternatives urgently! While the current trend back towards organic farming & gardening is a step in the right direction, any system of mono-culture (planting large areas with a single crop) will always be a struggle against nature's unstoppable tendency towards bio-diversity. Thus 'organic' in itself is still not the answer. We need sustainable systems & Permaculture can provide them.

When applied to growing, Permaculture models nature's own wild systems while substituting many plants & trees (many from similar climatic systems from around the World) that can provide for our needs. These new systems are wildlife-friendly too, as diversity provides many habitats, yet unlike mono-cultures, an imbalance in the number of species is never allowed to build up & create a problem. Nature always fills a vacuum & while a mono-cultured field may look full, it occupies only one level in terms of height & depth. Observation of nature's systems has shown there to be seven distinct vertical layers in any stable environment with a variety of rooting depths that draw up nutrients from all levels within the soil. This process is beneficial to all the species growing (& ultimately living) there. Stable systems also have stable microclimates, so 'crop failures' become insignificant as there will always be plenty of species that do crop well in any given year. Crop failure can of course be disastrous with mono-culturing, leading to mass famine in some cases. Permaculture is a rapidly growing science, with more & more being learned all the time to fine-tune the design process.

Bringing Permaculture design into our own gardens is a first but very important step that we can all make. At home we can create a low-maintenance attractive environment that can also provide us with a significant quantity of fresh, nutritious food at the same time. All we need is the information to help us do this, plus better access to a few more plants & trees that aren't currently easily available. Permaculture is something that we can all learn relatively easily; a lot of it is just common sense that we hadn't thought of before! Once we understand the basics, everything else builds on those principles & we become part of the worldwide group of people learning by simply living it. Whilst the ideas are relatively new (about thirty years), Permaculture systems have already been designed & applied successfully in all the different types of climate around the World, in many cases restoring productivity to land previously made barren by mono-culture systems & allowing people to feed themselves again (see the 'Greening the Desert ' movie for a fine example!). Permaculture works, as established designs clearly demonstrate, but then this is hardly a surprise as nature has been doing it right for a very long time!

Click here to view three slideshows introducing the principles on Aranya's own website

This can only be a quick introduction; a much more in-depth description of what Permaculture is about can be found in the many books that have now been written on the subject. There is also more to be found on the World Wide Web; check out the links page for a few examples. There is another short introduction on the About Permaculture pages of the Permaculture Association's website. The Association's website is currently the premier resource for all things sustainable, providing links to just about anything you can think of.... & if it doesn't, please let them know!