Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments. The word itself is a contraction not only of permanent agriculture but also of permanent culture, as cultures cannot survive for long without a sustainable agricultural base and landuse ethic. On one level, permaculture deals with plants, animals, buildings, and infrastructures (water, energy, communications). However, permaculture is not about these elements themselves, but rather the relationships we can create between them by the way we place them in the landscape.

The aim is to create systems that are ecologically-sound and economically viable which provide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute, and are therefore sustainable in the long term. Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants an animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life-supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.

Permaculture is based on the observation of natural systems, the wisdom contained in traditional farming systems, and modern scientific and technological knowledge. Although based on good ecological models, permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.

-- Bill Mollison
(excerpt from An Introduction To Permaculture)

The global village community has been developing over the last decade. It is the most remarkable revolution of thought, values, and technology that has yet evolved. This book is intended to speed not the plough, but rather the philosophy of a new and diverse approach to land and living, and make the plough obsolete.

For myself, I see no solution (political, economic) to the problems of mankind than the formation of small responsible communities involved in permaculture and appropriate technology. I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process.

Unwilling as some of us are to act, we must find ways to do so for our own survival. Not all of us are, or need to be, farmers and gardeners. However, everyone has skills and strengths to offer, and may form ecology parties or local action groups to change the politics of our local and state governments, to demand the use of public lands on behalf of landless people, and to join internationally to divert resources from waste and destruction to conservation and construction.

I believe we must change our philosophy before anything else changes. Change the philosophy of competition (which now pervades our educational system) to that of cooperation in free associations, change our material insecurity for a secure humanity, change the individual for the tribe, petrol for calories, and money for products.

But the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter. It sometimes seems that we are caught, all of us on earth, in a conscious or unconscious conspiracy to keep ourselves helpless. And yet it is people who produce all the needs of other people, and together we can survive. We ourselves can cure all the famine, all the injustice, and all the stupidity of the world. We can do it by understanding the way natural systems work, by careful forestry and gardening, by contemplation and by taking care of the earth.

People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball. Beware the monoculturist, in religion, health, farm or factory. He is driven mad by boredom, and can create war and try to assert power, because he is in fact powerless.

To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything we must first give it away. This is not a riddle. Only those who share their multiple and varied skills, true friendships, and sense of community and knowledge of the earth know they are safe wherever they go.

There are plenty of fights and adventures to hand; the fight against cold, hunger, poverty, ignorance, overpopulation and greed; adventures in friendship, humanity, applied ecology, and sophisticated design -- which would be a far better life than you may be living now, and which would mean a life for our children.

There is no other path for us than that of cooperative productivity and community responsibility. Take that path, and it will change your life in ways you cannot yet imagine.

-- Bill Mollison
(from An Introduction To Permaculture)