Who We Are
The Albuquerque Permaculture Guild comprises a loose network of folks in the Albuquerque area working to embody permaculture principles in our lives. Our membership includes people with active interests and experience in a wide variety of disciplines, including design, teaching, art, architecture, natural building and alternative technologies, gardening, computers, community organizing, and land restoration (to name a few).
Permaculture Ethics
Care of the Earth
Make provision for all life systems to continue and thrive. This entails applying our knowledge of physics, biology, and ecology to the beneficial design of sustainable human communities, communities that don't degrade the natural capital of the local watershed and don't draw down the carrying capacity of the region where they are situated.
Focusing on redeveloping already-settled areas so that food production is integrated into the local community, taking advantage of energy sources that aren't degraded with use (e.g., passive solar) or are renewable (e.g., food forest zones which receive wastes and supply energy), and reducing our energy needs through the intelligent orientation and layout of structures and communities will work to free unsettled areas for the rehabilitation of natural systems.
Care of people
Make provision for all people to access those resources necessary to their existence. Educating ourselves about the workings of natural plant ecologies and applying those principles to food production in local communities leads to a tapestry of diversified, mixed planting zones, neighborhood and kitchen gardens, and animal husbandry integrated into the layout of the community as a whole. Communities designed in this way would go a long way toward providing every member access to the resources required to guarantee basic subsistence rights, which has to be the foundation of all social capital.
Share and recycle the surplus
Reinvest surplus yields of food, materials, and profit locally to provide a positive return that enhances local social, economic, and ecological capital. All the signs indicate that the age of thoughtless resource exploitation and careless consumption is coming to an end. Only by setting limits to consumption can we invest in the future.
The sad reality is that we are in danger of perishing from our own stupidity and lack of personal responsibility to life. If we become extinct because of factors beyond our control, then we can at least die with pride in ourselves, but to create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claims to morality and consciousness.
--Bill Mollison