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The Overstory #156 - Permaculture Principles
By David Holmgren

::::::::::::::

The Overstory Book, 2nd Edition, a formatted, indexed and illustrated
compilation of The Overstory ejournal editions 1 - 138 is in stock.
Your purchase helps support publication of The Overstory:
http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/ovbook.html
ADDRESS CHANGES: Please send any changes in your e-mail address to
overstory AT agroforestry.net

::::::::::::::
The Overstory #156 - Permaculture Principles
By David Holmgren


Contents:
: INTRODUCTION
: Principle 1: OBSERVE AND INTERACT
: Principle 2: CATCH AND STORE ENERGY
: Principle 3: OBTAIN A YIELD
: Principle 4: APPLY SELF-REGULATION AND ACCEPT FEEDBACK
: Principle 5: USE AND VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SERVICES
: Principle 6: PRODUCE NO WASTE
: Principle 7: DESIGN FROM PATTERNS TO DETAILS
: Principle 8: INTEGRATE RATHER THAN SEGREGATE
: Principle 9: USE SMALL AND SLOW SOLUTIONS
: Principle 10: USE AND VALUE DIVERSITY
: Principle 11: USE EDGES AND VALUE THE MARGINAL
: Principle 12: CREATIVELY USE AND RESPOND TO CHANGE
: REFERENCES
: ORIGINAL SOURCE
: ABOUT THE AUTHOR
: RELATED EDITIONS OF THE OVERSTORY
: PUBLISHER NOTES
: SUBSCRIPTIONS

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INTRODUCTION
Permaculture principles are brief statements or slogans that can be
remembered as a checklist when considering the complex options for
design and evolution of ecological support systems. These principles can
be seen as universal, although the methods that express them will vary
greatly according to place and situation. Fundamentally, permaculture
design principles arise from a way of perceiving the world that is often
described as 'systems thinking' and 'design thinking.'

Principle 1: OBSERVE AND INTERACT
Good design depends on a free and harmonious relationship between nature
and people, in which careful observation and thoughtful interaction
provide the design inspiration, repertoire and patterns. It is not
something that is generated in isolation, but through continuous and
reciprocal interaction with the subject.
Within more conservative and socially bonded agrarian communities, the
ability of some individuals to stand back from, observe and interpret
both traditional and modern methods of land use, is a powerful tool in
evolving new and more appropriate systems. While complete change within
communities is always more difficult for a host of reasons, the presence
of locally evolved models, with its roots in the best of traditional and
modern ecological design, is more likely to be successful than a
pre-designed system introduced from outside. Further, a diversity of
such local models would naturally generate innovative elements which can
cross-fertilise similar innovations elsewhere.

Principle 2: CATCH AND STORE ENERGY
We live in a world of unprecedented wealth resulting from the harvesting
of the enormous storages of fossil fuels created by the earth over
billions of years. We have used some of this wealth to increase our
harvest of the Earth's renewable resources to an unsustainable degree.
Most of the adverse impacts of this over-harvesting will show up as
available fossil fuels decline. In financial language, we have been
living by consuming global capital in a reckless manner that would send
any business bankrupt.
Inappropriate concepts of wealth have led us to ignore opportunities to
capture local flows of both renewable and non-renewable forms of energy.
Identifying and acting on these opportunities can provide the energy
with which we can rebuild capital, as well as provide us with an
"income" for our immediate needs.
Some of the sources of energy include:
* Sun, wind and runoff water flows
* Wasted resources from agricultural, industrial and commercial
activities
The most important storages of future value include:
* Fertile soil with high humus content
* Perennial vegetation systems, especially trees, yield food and other
useful resources
* Water bodies and tanks
* Passive solar buildings

Principle 3: OBTAIN A YIELD
The previous principle focused our attention on the need to use existing
wealth to make long-term investments in natural capital. But there is no
point in attempting to plant a forest for the grandchildren if we
haven't got enough to eat today.
This principle reminds us that we should design any system to provide
for self-reliance at all levels (including ourselves), by using captured
and stored energy effectively to maintain the system and capture more
energy.
Without immediate and truly useful yields, whatever we design and
develop will tend to wither while elements that do generate immediate
yield will proliferate. Whether we attribute it to nature, market forces
or human greed, systems that most effectively obtain a yield, and use it
most effectively to meet the needs of survival, tend to prevail over
alternatives.

Principle 4: APPLY SELF-REGULATION AND ACCEPT FEEDBACK
This principle deals with self-regulatory aspects of permaculture design
that limit or discourage inappropriate growth or behaviour. With better
understanding of how positive and negative feedbacks work in nature, we
can design systems that are more self-regulating, thus reducing the work
involved in repeated and harsh corrective management.
Self-maintaining and regulating systems might be said to be the 'Holy
Grail' of permaculture: an ideal that we strive for but might never
fully achieve. Much of this is achieved by application of the
Integration and Diversity (Permaculture design principles 8 & 10) but it
is also fostered by making each element within a system as self-reliant
as is energy efficient. A system composed of self-reliant elements is
more robust to disturbance. Use of tough, semi-wild and self-reproducing
crop varieties and livestock breeds, instead of highly bred and
dependent ones is a classic permaculture strategy that exemplifies this
principle. On a larger scale, self-reliant farmers were once recognised
as the basis of a strong and independent country. Today's globalised
economies make for greater instability where effects cascade around the
world. Rebuilding self-reliance at both the element and system level
increases resilience.

Principle 5: USE AND VALUE RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SERVICES
Renewable resources are those that are renewed and replaced by natural
processes over reasonable periods, without the need for major
non-renewable inputs. In the language of business, renewable resources
should be seen as our sources of income, while non-renewable resources
can be thought of as capital assets. Spending our capital assets for
day-to-day living is unsustainable in anyone's language. Permaculture
design should aim to make best use of renewable natural resources to
manage and maintain yields, even if some use of non-renewable resources
is needed in establishing systems.
Renewable services (or passive functions) are those we gain from plants,
animals and living soil and water, without them being consumed. For
example, when we use a tree for wood we are using a renewable resource,
but when we use a tree for shade and shelter, we gain benefits from the
living tree that are non-consuming and require no harvesting energy.
This simple understanding is obvious and yet powerful in redesigning
systems where many simple functions have become dependent on
non-renewable and unsustainable resource use.

Principle 6: PRODUCE NO WASTE
This principle brings together traditional values of frugality and care
for material goods, the modern concern about pollution, and the more
radical perspective that sees wastes as resources and opportunities. The
earthworm is a suitable icon for this principle because it lives by
consuming plant litter (wastes), which it converts into humus that
improves the soil environment for itself, for soil micro-organisms, and
for the plants. Thus the earthworm, like all living things, is a part of
a web where the outputs of one are the inputs for another.
The industrial processes that support modern life can be characterised
by an input-output model, in which the inputs are natural materials and
energy, while the outputs are useful things and services. However, when
we step back from this process and take a long-term view, we can see all
these useful things end up as wastes (mostly in rubbish tips) and that
even the most ethereal of services required the degradation of energy
and resources to wastes. This model might therefore be better
characterised as "consume/excrete". The view of people as simply
consumers and excreters might be biological, but it is not ecological.

Principle 7: DESIGN FROM PATTERNS TO DETAILS
The first six principles tend to consider systems from the bottom-up
perspective of elements, organisms, and individuals. The second six
principles tend to emphasise the top-down perspective of the patterns
and relationships that tend to emerge by system self-organisation and
co-evolution. The commonality of patterns observable in nature and
society allows us to not only make sense of what we see, but to use a
pattern from one context and scale, to design in another. Pattern
recognition is an outcome of the application of Principle 1: Observe and
interact, and is the necessary precursor to the process of design.
The idea which initiated permaculture was the forest as a model for
agriculture. While not new, its lack of application and development
across many bioregions and cultures was an opportunity to apply one of
the most common ecosystem models to human landuse. Although many
critiques and limitations to the forest model need to be acknowledged,
it remains a powerful example of pattern thinking which continues to
inform permaculture and related concepts, such as forest gardening,
agroforestry and analogue forestry.
The use of zones of intensity of use around an activity centre such as a
farmhouse to help in the placement of elements and subsystems is an
example of working from pattern to details. Similarly environmental
factors of sun, wind, flood, and fire can be arranged in sectors around
the same focal point. These sectors have both a bioregional and a site
specific character which the permaculture designer carries in their head
to make sense of a site and help organize appropriate design elements
into a workable system.

Principle 8: INTEGRATE RATHER THAN SEGREGATE
In every aspect of nature, from the internal workings of organisms to
whole ecosystems, we find the connections between things are as
important as the things themselves. Thus the purpose of a functional and
self-regulating design is to place elements in such a way that each
serves the needs and accepts the products of other elements.
This principle focuses more closely on the different types of
relationships that draw elements together in more closely integrated
systems, and on improved methods of designing communities of plants,
animals and people to gain benefits from these relationships.
By correct placement of plants, animals, earthworks and other
infrastructure it is possible to develop a higher degree of integration
and self-regulation without the need for constant human input in
corrective management. For example, the scratching of poultry under
forage forests can be used to harvest litter to down slope garden
systems by appropriate location. Herbaceous and woody weed species in
animal pasture systems often contribute to soil improvement,
biodiversity, medicinal and other special uses. Appropriate rotationally
grazed livestock can often control these weedy species without
eliminating them and their values completely.
In developing an awareness of the importance of relationships in the
design of self-reliant systems, two statements in permaculture
literature and teaching have been central:
* Each element performs many functions.
* Each important function is supported by many elements.
The connections or relationships between elements of an integrated
system can vary greatly. Some may be predatory or competitive; others
are co-operative, or even symbiotic. All these types of relationships
can be beneficial in building a strong integrated system or community,
but permaculture strongly emphasises building mutually beneficial and
symbiotic relationships. This is based on two beliefs:
* We have a cultural disposition to see and believe in predatory and
competitive relationships, and discount co-operative and symbiotic
relationships, in nature and culture.
* Co-operative and symbiotic relationships will be more adaptive in a
future of declining energy.

Principle 9: USE SMALL AND SLOW SOLUTIONS
Systems should be designed to perform functions at the smallest scale
that is practical and energy-efficient for that function. Human scale
and capacity should be the yardstick for a humane, democratic and
sustainable society.
For example, in forestry, fast growing trees are often short lived,
while some apparently slow growing but more valuable species accelerate
and even surpass the fast species in their second and third decades. A
small plantation of thinned and pruned trees can yield more total value
than a large plantation without management.

Principle 10: USE AND VALUE DIVERSITY
The great diversity of forms, functions and interactions in nature and
humanity are the source of evolved systemic complexity. The role and
value of diversity in nature, culture and permaculture is itself
complex, dynamic, and at times apparently contradictory. Diversity needs
to be seen as a result of the balance and tension in nature between
variety and possibility on the one hand, and productivity and power on
the other.
It is now widely recognised that monoculture is a major cause of
vulnerability to pests and diseases, and therefore of the widespread use
of toxic chemicals and energy to control these. Polyculture (the
cultivation of many plant and/or animal species and varieties within an
integrated system) is one of the most important and widely recognised
applications of the use of diversity to reduce vulnerability to pests,
adverse seasons and market fluctuations. Polyculture also reduces
reliance on market systems, and bolsters household and community
self-reliance by providing a wider range of goods and services.

Principle 11: USE EDGES AND VALUE THE MARGINAL
Tidal estuaries are a complex interface between land and sea that can be
seen as a great ecological trade market between these two great domains
of life. The shallow water allows penetration of sunlight for algae and
plant growth, as well as providing forage areas for wading and other
birds. The fresh water from catchment streams rides over the heavier
saline water that pulses back and forth with the daily tides,
redistributing nutrients and food for the teeming life.
Within every terrestrial ecosystem, the living soil, which may only be a
few centimetres deep, is an edge or interface between non-living mineral
earth and the atmosphere. For all terrestrial life, including humanity,
this is the most important edge of all. Only a limited number of hardy
species can thrive in shallow, compacted and poorly drained soil, which
has insufficient interface. Deep, well-drained and aerated soil is like
a sponge, a great interface that supports productive and healthy plant
life.
This principle works from the premise that the value and contribution of
edges, and the marginal and invisible aspects of any system should not
only be recognised and conserved, but that expansion of these aspects
can increase system productivity and stability. For example, increasing
the edge between field and pond can increase the productivity of both.
Alley farming and shelterbelt forestry can be seen as systems where
increasing edge between field and forest has contributed to
productivity.

Principle 12: CREATIVELY USE AND RESPOND TO CHANGE
Permaculture is about the durability of natural living systems and human
culture, but this durability paradoxically depends in large measure on
flexibility and change. Many stories and traditions have the theme that
within the greatest stability lie the seeds of change. Science has shown
us that the apparently solid and permanent is, at the cellular and
atomic level, a seething mass of energy and change, similar to the
descriptions in various spiritual traditions.
The acceleration of ecological succession within cultivated systems is
the most common expression of this principle in permaculture literature
and practice, and illustrates the first thread. For example, the use of
fast growing nitrogen fixing trees to improve soil, and to provide
shelter and shade for more valuable slow growing food trees, reflects an
ecological succession process from pioneers to climax. The progressive
removal of some or all of the nitrogen fixers for fodder and fuel as the
tree crop system matures shows the success. The seed in the soil capable
of regeneration after natural disaster or land use change (e.g. to an
annual crop phase) provides the insurance to re-establish the system in
the future.

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REFERENCES
D. Holmgren, D. Collected Writings 1978-2000, (e-book). Holmgren Design
Services 2002.
Heinberg, R. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial
Societies. New Society Publishers 2003.
Lovelock, J. Gaia: A New Look At Life. Oxford University Press. 1979.
Mollison, B. & D. Holmgren. Permaculture One. Corgi 1978 (out of print).
Mollison, B. Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, Tagari. 1988.
Odum, H.T. Environment, Power & Society, John Wiley. 1971.
Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: A study of economics as if people
mattered. 1973.
Wiener, N. Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine. 1948.

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ORIGINAL SOURCE
With the gracious permission of the author, this edition of The
Overstory was adapted from the original manuscript for:
Holmgren, D. 2004 (Version 3). Essence of Permaculture. Copyright © 2004
Holmgren Design Services, Hepburn, Victoria, Australia.
The entire publication can be viewed at:
<http://www.holmgren.com.au/html/Writings/Writings.html>.
For more information about David's work, contact:
Holmgren Design Services
Melliodora (Hepburn Permaculture Gardens)
16 Fourteenth St.
Hepburn
Victoria 3461
Australia
Tel: +61 (0)353483636
Email: info AT holmgren.com.au
Web site: <http://www.holmgren.com.au>
Publications: <http://www.holmgren.com.au/html/Publications/pub.html>
Appearances:
<http://www.holmgren.com.au/html/AppearEvents/appearances.html>

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Holmgren is a permaculture designer and consultant. He is perhaps
best known as co-originator of the permaculture concept and for
co-authorship of Permaculture One (1978) with Bill Mollison, a milestone
in the application of environmental design to productive land use. Since
1978 he has authored numerous articles and several books, conducted
workshops and courses, and consulted for urban and rural projects in
Australia and New Zealand. His most recent book Permaculture:Principles
and Pathways Beyond Sustainability provides a broad conceptual framework
for permaculture design education. David is also respected for his
commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects.
He teaches by personal example that a sustainable lifestyle is a
realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism.
Contact David at: Holmgren Design Services, Melliodora (Hepburn
Permaculture Gardens), 16 Fourteenth St, Hepburn, 3461, Australia; Tel:
+61 (0)353483636; E-mail: <info AT holmgren.com.au>; Web site:
<http://www.holmgren.com.au>.

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WEB LINKS
Many of David Holmgren's excellent articles can be viewed at
(and his books can be ordered from):
<http://www.holmgren.com.au>.
Introduction to Permaculture: Concepts and Resources is an
excellent introduction with comprehensive resource links:
<http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/perma.html>
InterGarden - Permaculture Information - Discussion - Links has
discussion forums and extensive listing of permaculture-related
links: <http://sunsite.unc.edu/london/permaculture.html>
The Permaculture Activist site offers an array of information and
resource links: <http://www.permacultureactivist.net>

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RELATED EDITIONS OF THE OVERSTORY
The Overstory #116 - Observe and Interact
The Overstory #95--Agroecology
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory95.html>
The Overstory #94--Permaculture
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory94.html>
The Overstory #88--Revegetation Planning for Farm Forestry
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory88.html>
The Overstory #44--Integrated Systems Approach
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory44.html>
The Overstory #18--Designing Resource Systems
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory18.html>
The Overstory #7-- Agroforestry Systems
<http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/overstory7.html>


::::::::::::::
PUBLISHER NOTES

The Overstory Book, 2nd Edition, a formatted, indexed and illustrated
compilation of The Overstory ejournal editions 1 - 138 is in stock.
Your purchase helps support publication of The Overstory:
http://www.agroforestry.net/overstory/ovbook.html
ADDRESS CHANGES: Please send any changes in your e-mail address to
overstory AT agroforestry.net

::::::::::::::


Publisher: Permanent Agriculture Resources
Editor: Craig R. Elevitch
Distributor:
The Overstory is distributed by Agroforestry Net, Inc., a nonprofit
501(c)(3) organization based in Hawaii.
Address: P.O. Box 428, Holualoa, Hawaii 96725 USA
Email: overstory AT agroforestry.net ; Web site:
http://www.overstory.org
Past editions of The Overstory: http://www.overstory.org
This publication is Copyright 2005 Permanent Agriculture Resources.
All Rights Reserved Worldwide. For Conditions of Use please contact
overstory AT agroforestry.net or write to Agroforestry Net, Inc. at the
address above.
This journal is designed to provide agricultural information, but
is sent with the understanding that the editors and publishers are
not engaged in rendering consultation. If expert assistance is
required, the services of a professional should be sought.

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