Stacey and Heidi working on plant identification in a tropical garden in Belize.
On-site projects at Wild Earth Stewardship Center: Our test plots at the Center are designed to test hundreds of techniques and planting combinations for different tropical and subtropical microclimates, soil requirements, crop varieties, and available growing spaces so that we may fine-tune best practices for the Center as well as for our community outreach projects. By determining best practices to rejuvenate our natural environment we are able to grow much more in smaller spaces, in a healthier, more balanced, and disease and pest-resistant manner that more closely mimics the diversity found in natural ecosystems.
Off-site community outreach projects: Our permaculture and natural farming community projects enable us to help people gain the knowledge, tools, and support they need to regenerate landscapes to more balanced, healthy, vibrant, wild spaces. Permaculture principles provide direction for creating clever, whole-system solutions for some of our communities most pressing problems and empower interested entrepreneurs to become more profitable in naturally growing food, medicine, and hundreds of other useful products.
To learn more about our permaculture community outreach projects and techniques such as agroforestry, edible forest gardens, restorative soil techniques, seed saving, natural fertilizers and pest control, and much more please check out the permaculture community projects pages.
Permaculture is a term coined by the pioneers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to represent permanent culture and permanent agriculture. Permaculture is an intentional, whole-systems approach to designing and creating sustainable, regenerating systems that are modeled on natural systems.
A helpful way of understanding permaculture is to think of it as a toolbox that serves to guide us on how and when to use our “tools” such as natural building, renewable energy and waste systems, sustainable agriculture, and consensus processes.[1] Permaculture guides us to create a system that balances the needs of humans with those of all other living things to create mutually beneficial outcomes, while simultaneously preserving and rejuvenating our natural environment.
The core of Permaculture is focused on our ability to participate in the ecology. Even if we think we are choosing not to participate, we are. When we support products from companies that degrade the environment we are contributing to such things as deforestation and pumping toxins into our soil and waterways. We participate with every choice we make, and we each have the choice to participate with intention and care. It is hypocritical to say we support the preservation of forests and saving the natural habitat, yet subscribe to a daily newspaper, buy processed food and beverages in plastic containers, and drive everywhere. We need to reconfigure our infrastructure to be more regionally and ecologically sound. We each have a choice to participate in equitable social systems, right livelihood, humane animal cultivation, and non-toxic agriculture by supporting individuals and industries that do the same. We can choose to support local, environmentally beneficial community enterprises, local sustainable agriculture, and other industries that embody our beliefs.
Permaculture is the conscious design and co-creative evolution of agriculturally productive ecosystems and cooperative and economically just social systems that have the diversity, stability, and resilience of “natural” systems. It is the harmonious integration of landscapes and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
--Drawn from Bill Mollison’s “Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future” and “Permaculture One,” modified and expanded upon by David Jacke
“Of all the various incarnations of ecological design, sustainable living, holistic systems management, and related big-picture ideas for living on a small planet, the one that grabs me is permaculture. None of the other schemes seem so complete, self-contained, and naturally integrated. That may be because permaculture design combines a set of coherent and interlinked principles, an energy- and resource-conserving attention to relative placement of elements, and, unlike most other design systems, a set of ethical guidelines. It is also amply broad-reaching to appeal to a restless generalist like me.”
--Toby Hemmingway, author of “Gaia’s Garden”
Permaculture design principles guide us to work with rather than against nature, to turn every problem into a solution, and to make the least amount of change for the greatest possible effect.[2] Turning our front or back yard into a vegetable garden, and moving back into human-induced desertified areas to rejuvenate them are two simple ways to turn common problems into solutions. To sustain permanent agriculture we need to adopt methods where the needs of the system are provided for by that system.[3] This approach helps create the most abundance and the least amount of work by integrating components in such a way that the waste, or outputs of any component is the input, or fuel for something else. In this way nothing is wasted and there is harmony between our needs and those of the animals, the community and the environment. We can design to create an abundance of energy, yield, and even leisure by ensuring that every element in our design serves at least two or more functions. For example, chickens can be used to clear land for planting, fertilize the soil and give us eggs. Fruit and nut bearing trees can provide shade for people and livestock, reduce wind to outdoor living spaces and provide food.
Permaculture techniques enable us to create balanced and prosperous micro-systems where each species works cooperatively to recycle wastes, provide a plentitude of regenerative resources, prevent and recover from natural disasters, and maintain healthy ecosystems. The capacity for change is limited only by our creativity, and that it is theoretically unlimited.[4]
Ecological Design is any integrative, ecologically responsibly design process that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes, providing specific ways of minimizing energy and material use, reducing pollution, preserving habitat, and fostering community, health and beauty.
The five principles of Ecological Design are: [5]
1. Solutions grow from place: understanding the unique environment before building leads to innovative designs that take advantage of local nuances
2. Accounting informs design: just like the economic accounting that businesses undertake, ecological accounting should be done to account for the impact of all aspects of building - from the amount of energy required to obtain and transport materials to the impact of the design on nearby ecosystems
3. Design with nature: just as nature breaks down materials to be used by another organism, so too should our designs mimic natural processes to minimize our impact
4. Everyone is a designer: ideas form out of necessity, so don't look to just traditional sources for inspiration
5. Make nature visible: too often we forget about what all goes into our existence because we don't see it (the pipes that bring us water, the wind blocked by the windows of our buildings, etc.)
[1] Toby Hemmingway. “Permaculture Design Courses,” available at: http://www.patternliteracy.com/index.html
[2] Mollison, Bill. Permaculture : A Designer's Manual. Minneapolis: Tagari Publications, 1997, p. 15
[3] Mollison, Bill. Permaculture : A Designer's Manual. Minneapolis: Tagari Publications, 1997. p. 55
[4] Mollison, Bill. Permaculture : A Designer's Manual. Minneapolis: Tagari Publications, 1997. p. 15
[5] Van der Ryn, Sim, Stuart Cowan, Ecological Design, Island Press, 1995.
