|
     
Permaculture is a design methodology that offers its users immense hope for a
sustainable future. The term, coined by Bill Mollison, a British Tanzanian as
early as 1959, is a shortening of ‘permanent agriculture’, or ‘permanent
culture’. Permaculture provides practical answers to questions about human
settlement and use of the earth and its resources. Hence, permaculture
landscapes mirror patterns of diverse, healthy environments to create
profitable, productive and sustainable ‘cultivated ecosystems’.
Permaculture ultimately embodies a healthy, equitable and ‘best-care’
approach to the land and its people. In so doing it may be considered a
philosophy whose time has come, and is highly applicable today. To begin, one
must be aware of broad principles that underlie site-specific expression of
place, time, biodiversity, people and their needs.
Permaculture Principles
Many books have been written about Permaculture principles and their
application. In brief these principles include:
 |
Nature is the ultimate designer; it is our ultimate teacher. Natural systems
show a creative order that seemingly arises out of chaos. We must work with
nature rather than in opposition to it. |
|
Whatever we take, we must return. Cycles form a basis for the stability and
richness of sustainable ecosystems. |
|
One makes the least change for the greatest effect. The placement of elements
relative to each other results in an aggregate yield greater than the sum of a
design’s individual parts. |
|
Diversity forms the basis for redundancy, which in the face of outside flux
results in readjustment and stability. |
|
Every element has more than one function; every function is achieved by more
than one element. |
|
Successful site design arises out of marrying the land’s unique attributes
with a human response that protects nature’s capital, takes only what is
needed and shares any surplus. |
| Permaculture can be expressed universally with practical
applications of Ecological Footprint, The Natural Step, true Smart
Growth, Eksitics, and other organizing frameworks for sustainability. |
It is not uncommon for permaculture to form the underpinning of community
design and land management wherever sustainability, health, and affordability
are understood and practiced.
Scales of Application
Permaculture has typically been practiced at the site level; at the scale of
individual land holdings. It would seem reasonable however to apply its
principles (which are all-encompassing and general) to the neighbourhood scale
or indeed the eco-community, municipality or region. C. Brad Peterson
Environmental Management and Landscape Architecture works on applying
permaculture principles in this context.
| Permaculture is an ideal design tool to use with
eco-village and healthy green community planning and design, and in the
design and management of individual properties. |
Projects List
Indeed, permaculture is ‘in the background’ in almost every project
carried out by C. Brad Peterson Environmental Management and Landscape
Architecture. Brad Peterson designed the first permaculture farm plan in
Ontario, the O’Sullivan Farm Plan near Arthur, ON, in 1988. Since then Brad
has worked on many projects where permaculture principles are expressed either
very explicitly, or form a quiet but firm foundation to the function and
placement of site elements, the design of exterior spaces and flow patterns, and
functional programming of the project.
Permaculture projects are denoted at the end of the Projects
descriptions by "Pc".
|
