What Permaculture Is

Most permaculture courses open with a creation story. Two Australians looked at industrial farming, thought hard, and invented a design science. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren are named, a date is given, and the class moves on to swales and chicken tractors.

The story is worth telling, because the two men did real work and the word does have an origin. It is also worth checking, because the movement leans on the creation story harder than the record supports, and because a learner who believes permaculture was invented in 1974 will spend the rest of their life re-inventing what a Roman farmer wrote down two thousand years ago.

Where the word came from

Bill Mollison (1928 to 2016) was a senior tutor in Environmental Psychology at the University of Tasmania. David Holmgren was an undergraduate at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. They worked together in the mid-1970s at Mollison's one-hectare property on the footslopes of Mount Wellington, on the suburban edge of Hobart.

Holmgren's own account is plain: "The word permaculture was coined by Bill Mollison and myself in the mid-1970's to describe an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man." It came public in their 1978 book Permaculture One. The term first meant "permanent agriculture." It was later widened to "permanent culture," because the design question turned out to include people, buildings, and how they organise themselves.

Mollison went on to write Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (Tagari, 1988), the book the Permaculture Design Course is built on. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 1981, "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture." Holmgren, with Su Dennett, built Melliodora at Hepburn Springs, and in 2002 published Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, which is where the twelve design principles in lesson 103 come from.

The plain definition, in Holmgren's words: "Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs." Around that sits the ethical frame you will meet in lesson 102: care of the earth, care of people, and fair share.

The debt

Mollison credited the source himself, and the movement tends to leave the credit in the foreword. In the Designers' Manual he wrote: "I believe that unless we adopt sophisticated aboriginal belief systems and learn respect for all life, then we lose our own." Aboriginal Tasmanian practice is named as an inspiration, not a footnote.

The methods carry a longer debt still. Polyculture, terracing, water harvesting, seed saving, legume rotation, and the integration of trees with crops and stock are older than writing. The vault here holds the receipts in the original languages: Cato's plan for a hundred-jugera farm, laid out as vineyard, irrigated garden, osier bed, olive yard, meadow, corn field, wood lot, orchard, and mast grove; the Capitulare de villis (c. 800 CE) requiring every royal estate to save its own seed and make its own lard, cheese, beer, and tools "so that there is no need to seek them elsewhere or to borrow them"; Crescenzi's fourteenth-century estate balancing water, soil, and stock; Varahamihira's rain gauge and water-finding in sixth-century India.

A synthesis, and what follows

Permaculture is a synthesis. It is not an invention, in the sense the marketing uses the word. The synthesis is real and useful: Mollison and Holmgren put whole-systems thinking, ecology, and design method around practices that had been scattered across continents and centuries, and they gave people a way to learn them. Earlier synthesists had done some of it. Joseph Russell Smith published Tree Crops in 1929, and had already written about permanent agriculture before that.

The problem is what the creation story does to a learner. It makes the movement the source, so the learner pays the movement for access to something the movement did not make. Mollison taught a three-week course that became the PDC, and after the first International Permaculture Convergence the curriculum was formalised and shortened to two weeks. Critics of the decades since argue that the self-help model, "akin to franchising," produced market-focused social relationships of the kind the originators set out to oppose. That critique is in the public record and it is fair to read it.

What you do with this

You do not need permission to use these methods, and you do not need a certificate to observe your own land. You need the methods, the sources, and the ground.