What is Permaculture Design?
The word permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s, is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture as well as permanent culture.
The conscious design, installation and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems creates the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems without violating the earths resources.
Permaculture is a design system and philosophy that uses land in a way that integrates human dwellings and activities with agricultural systems and the local natural ecologies.
Utilising observable natural laws and acting carefully and ethically we can actually regenerate systems that have been depleted. By safe guarding and building natural resources such as forests and water we are not only looking after ourselves but all future generations.
To learn more please search amongst the huge amount of resources online, or look for your nearest Permaculture network or project.
To get a very well rounded and indepth understanding of Permaculture Design take a full 72 hr PDC which will leave you confident in understanding the priciples and considerations of regenerative design.
What is the use of "Integral"?
Integral Theory seeks a comprehensive understanding of humans and the universe by combining insights from all sources, assuming they all contain partial truth.
It attempts to introduce a more universal and holistic perspective or approach, which incorporates other points of view in a larger synthesis, which in this age of globalisation, segregation through belief and loss of community, seems like a powerfully non- violent way to proceed.
Ken Wilber is regarded as the leading authority in integral modelling, and has published many good books.
It is Wilbers Quadrant theory that has influenced the design work within Integralpermanence. To summarise, Wilber suggests we can live a more fulfilling and rich life by paying attention to four "quadrants" of our being. These can be represented in different ways but here they are summarised simply to;
Internal "I", Internal "We", External "I", External "We"
Reading Wilbers work is highly recommended, but to summise, if we design to meet the needs of all aspects of our internal and external environment, we must be heading the right direction!
Got a piece of land you want to Permaculture?!
Full 72 Hr Permaculture Course Overview
(For a complete course breakdown click here to see a set of full teaching notes)
The 72 hr design course will be conducted in the internationally accepted manner. The 72 hours of course work required to receive a Permaculture Design Certificate, will be covered over a 10- 16 day period, mixing hands-on with plenty of classroom studies. All students are required to be present for the full course if they wish to receive the certificate.
Permaculture courses are fairly standardized as far as content. We will cover every major topic in Bill Mollisons: Permaculture: a Designers Manual.( Unless otherwise stated for bioregional focus) So quickly what that includes is the following:
1. Philosophies and Ethics underlying permaculture.
2. Basic permaculture principals and how they shape things in general
3. Patterns in Nature, and how to use that in design
4. Methods of design. How to go from a damaged piece of land to having an idea for how to move forward with it.
5. Climactic factors. We will cover all the major climates and how to work with them.
6. Trees, forests, and why we want to mimic their systems.
7. Water: catchment, usage, importance, and conservation. Also waste treatment.
8. Soil, minerals, microorganisms, building new soil, and preventing erosion
9. Earthworks: How to shape the land to help it acheive the goals we are aiming for.
10. Aquaculture
11. Natural Building
12. Alternative systems: community living, and other ways of choosing to live differently that works well for people and the planet.
Each of these categories has subcategories and each teacher also has their own additions and certain topics that are stressed over others.
What to expect from the course:
This course is a certified 72-hour Permaculture Design Course (PDC). This course has a preset curriculum based off of the content of Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designers Manual.(Unless otherwise stated due to bioregional focus) During the course, we will touch on every major topic in the book, and will go into various amounts of detail depending on both the desires of the students as well as the expertise of the instructors.
Upon completing the course you will receive a Permaculture Certificate which entitles you to use the word permaculture in your endeavors as well as to teach the course, or work as a permaculture consultant if you are so inclined.
The Permaculture course lessons are split between lecture-style classroom sessions and hands-on demonstrations, along with one small and one large design project that students will work on in teams. By the end of the course each person will have been involved in a complete, integrated permaculture design of a selected site. This is one of the requirements of the Permaculture certification, as well as one of the most valuable learning tools of the course.
What can you do to prepare for the course:
This course is intended for the beginner, who may have just heard about Permaculture for the first time, as well as for those with some experience, who may be practicing Permaculture already, but are interested in learning the theoretical framework behind it. You are not expected to have any specific knowledge or skills upon arrival. We do think it is helpful to start thinking about ecological systems, and permaculture design in advance. Read! Find a book about design, about organic gardening, about integrated systems, about ecology, about solution based exploration of our world's problems. All of these subjects will provide you with some context to the lessons of the course. Or, if you have a specific piece of property or ecological area that you are primarily interested in applying Permaculture principals to, sit and observe it, map it, read about it, or talk to others who are working in similar environments. Most of all, be excited to learn and be ready to soak up the information of the course.
