Notes on "Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability"

Preface

• Permaculture is *positivistic*
• 5 Assumptions on which permaculture was *originally* (permaculture one) based: 1) The environmental crisis is real 2) human population and industry are negatively affecting biodiversity 3) Humans are subject to the energy laws that govern the universe 4) Fossil fuels were seen as the primary cause of population and technology increases 5) depletion of fossil fuels will see a return to the general patterns observable in nature and pre-industrial societies dependent on renewable energy and resources.

• "Permaculture is a creative design response to a world of declining energy"
• Permaculture: 1) using existing wealth to rebuilding natural capital 2) emphasises bottom-up ‘redesign’ (individuals, households) 3) predicated on the likelihood of some degree of collapse and breakdown in technology, economics and even society 4) sees pre-industrial sustainable societies as providing models that reflect the more general system design principles observable in nature

Note the emphasis here on "bottom-up", "nature and pre-industrial societies", "collapse and breakdown of technology".

I will quibble with the emphasis on "collapse" in that (and Holmgren later also states) it could also be useful to people who are living a reduced energy life for moral or ethical reasons:

"Having pinned the relevance of permaculture to a future with less energy, what might be its relevance in some brave new world of abundant energy and resources? This new world could include nuclear energy and weapons, genetic engineering, space colonies, or any of the other hoped-for or feared possibilities. I suspect that the impact of permaculture would contract to influence the lives of relatively isolated individuals and groups who hold to minimal energy and resource use for ethical reasons."

On the other hand, this may be to focus too much on energy. There are other aspects to the environmental crisis, soil erosion, plastics and their effect on health and fertility?, biodiversity etc. How do these fit in?

Waves

Holmgren notes that 'waves' of environmentalism "tend to coincide with recession in the mainstream economy", do they? If so why?