Albuquerque Permaculture Guild

Principles of Permaculture Design

Permaculture is not a fashionable form of organic gardening. Various organic gardening approaches may be incorporated into a permaculture design, but permaculture itself is not that kind of discipline. Permaculture is not about how to build an energy efficient house or office. Principles and strategies that go into the creation of energy efficient structures are a part of the permaculture bag of tricks, but they are not our primary focus.

Permaculture is about the patterns and dynamics of relationships among organisms and objects in the natural world. That's pretty general. More specifically, permaculture's focus is how to think about designing an organic garden (for instance) and how to think about where to place it in relationship to your house, your office, your orchard, and your chickens.

In life, any two elements (objects, organisms, colors, typefaces...) placed in proximity to one another interact dynamically. In permaculture, we study these interactions so we can place ourselves in the web of relationships in ways that enable us to care for the earth, care for people, and contribute to the growth of sustainable wealth.

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Bill Mollison's Basic Design Principles

  1. Work with nature rather than against the natural elements, forces, pressures, processes, agencies, and evolutions, so that we assist rather than impede natural developments.
  2. The Problem is the Solution: everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not (if the wind blows cold, let us use both its strength and its coolness to advantage). A corollary of this principle is that everything is a positive resource; it is just up to us to work out how we use it as such.
  3. Make the least change for the greatest possible effect.
  4. The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited. The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible within a system is in the limit of the information and the imagination of the designer.
  5. Everything gardens. Everything has an effect on its environment.

Practical Design Considerations

  1. The systems we construct should last as long as possible and take the least possible maintenance.
  2. These systems, fueled by the sun, should produce yield sufficient not only to their own needs, but to the needs of the people creating or maintaining them. Thus, they are sustainable, as they sustain both themselves and those who construct them.
  3. We can use [nonrenewable] energy to construct these systems, providing that in their lifetime, they store or conserve more energy than we used to construct and maintain them.

Principles of Natural Systems

  1. Nothing in nature grows forever. There is a constant cycle of decay and rebirth.
  2. Continuation of life depends on the maintenance of the global bio-geochemical cycles of essential elements, in particular carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus.
  3. The probability of extinction of a population or a species is greatest when its density is either very high or very low. Both too few and too many individuals in a given area may reach thresholds of extinction.
  4. The chance that a species has to survive and reproduce is dependent primarily upon one or two key factors in the complex web or relations between the organism and its environment. A corollary is the law of the minimum, which says that the resource in least supply is the one that limits the number of individuals of a given species that a particular region can support.
  5. Our ability to change the face of the earth increases at a faster rate than our ability to foresee the consequences of change.
  6. Living organisms are not only means but ends. In addition to their instrumental value to humans and other living organisms, they have an intrinsic worth.

Principles of Resource Management