David Holmgren brings into sharper focus the powerful and still evolving Permaculture concept he pioneered with Bill Mollison in the 1970s. It draws together and integrates 25 years of thinking and teaching to reveal a whole new way of understanding and action behind a simple set of design principles. The 12 design principles are each represented by a positive action statement, an icon and a traditional proverb or two that captures the essence of each principle.Holmgren draws a correlation between every aspect of how we organize our lives, communities and landscapes and our ability to creatively adapt to the ecological realities that shape human destiny. For students and teachers of Permaculture this book provides something more fundamental and distilled than Mollison's encyclopedic Designers Manual. For the general reader it provides refreshing perspectives on a range of environmental issues and shows how permaculture is much more than just a system of gardening. For anyone seriously interested in understanding the foundations of sustainable design and culture, this book is essential reading. Although a book of ideas, the big picture is repeatedly grounded by reference to Holmgren's own place, Melliodora, and other practical examples.
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About the Author
David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator with Bill Mollison of the permaculture concept following the publication of "Permaculture One" in 1978. Since then he has written several more books, developed three properties using permaculture principles, conducted workshops and courses in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Japan. Within the growing and international permaculture movement, David is respected for his commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects and teaching by personal example, that a sustainable lifestyle is a realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependant consumerism. As well as constant involvement in the practical side of permaculture, David is passionate about the philosophical and conceptual foundations for sustainability which are highlighted in his latest book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. With this book already on its second print run, and an increasingly high profile as a public speaker, David Holmgren provides leadership with his refreshing and unorthodox approach to the environmental issues of our time.David lives with his partner Su Dennett and their son Oliver at "Melliodora", a one-hectare permaculture demonstration site at Hepburn Springs, Central Victoria, Australia. Visit his web site at www.holmgren.com.au.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
107 of 109 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book has rekindled my interest in Permaculture.
The author, David Holmgren, is the co-creator, with Bill Mollison of the
term "permaculture", and the co-author of the original permaculture
book, _Permaculture One_. Now, some 25 years after that seminal
book, Holmgren has written a timely and comprehensive synthesis that
brings permaculture principles together in an exiting new way.
The book highlights our place at a unique moment in history: at the peak
of the global oil production curve; at the beginning of the end of cheap
fossil energy. This is, for me, the book's most compelling motif: it
positions permaculture as a strategy for a future of inevitable "energy
descent". Although Holmgren hints that this energy descent may take any
number of horrific pathways, he appears to have chosen the term
"descent" as a hopeful alternative to collapse, crash, or dieoff.
Holmgren insightfully points out that is not just our reserves of fossil
fuel that we've been burning through. Since the Reagan/Thatcher years,
he claims, global capitalism has been on a frenzy of job cutting and
"just-in-time" inventory reduction. This amounts to a destruction of
the embedded intelligence and a severe draw-down of the capital stocks
of our institutions: a severe loss of embedded energy. Furthermore, he
worries that due to privatization and short-term bottom-line thinking,
maintenance on our built-environment and physical infrastructure has been
neglected: another huge loss of embedded energy.
On a hopeful note, Holmgren compares this situation to a forest fire: as
the conflagration of global capitalism burns through its huge pulse of
embedded energy, the time will be ripe for pioneers to take root and
produce a flush of new growth. It is a moment of high potential for
systemic change, and Holmgren's book hopes to provide "Principles and
Pathways" to seed and guide that change.
The subtitle of this book includes the phrase "Beyond Sustainability".
It is a well-established insight of permaculture that sustainability is
not enough: in a world that is already degraded, we need to achieve an
excess yield beyond sustainability that we can feed back into the great
work of restoration. Holmgren's contribution to this area is to point
out is that it is hard to even give meaning to the term "sustainability"
while we are in the midst of a dramatic energy descent with constantly
declining energy availability. We must, of course, aim for a soft
landing and a smooth transition to a sustainable future but our
immediate problem is to safely negotiate the descent itself.
All this is in addition, of course, to Holmgren's wise and fresh take on the more traditional
subject matter of permaculture design. This book is a must-read, equal
in stature to Mollison's _Permaculture: a Practical Guide for a
Sustainable Future_.
87 of 92 people found the following review helpful
By J.W.K
Format:Paperback
That the world we now live in is unsustainable goes without saying. Our skyrocketing population puts enormous pressure on the productive and absorptive capacities of the land, outstripping the natural carrying capacity of the planet by some twenty percent (see Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel). In effect, we are stealing away the life of the planet and the life of future generations. As ever more fisheries collapse, forests shrink, rangelands deteriorate, soils erode, species vanish, temperatures rise, rivers run dry, water tables fall, ozone depletion expands and polar ice caps melt across the globe, the single most important question humanity has faced resonates ever louder: How can we live sustainably?
Amid the cacophony of scholarly and political debate surrounding this issue, the hushed emergence of permaculture has by and large gone unnoticed. Defined as the use of systems thinking and design principles to consciously design "landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs," the permaculture concept is nothing less than the science of sustainability. And since the joint publication of Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (now out of print) by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-seventies, permaculture has become a veritable movement - a legitimate answer to the environmental and agricultural crises which plague humanity. Unfortunately, for the past twenty-five years, those who wished to learn more about permaculture were limited to joining expensive seminars and workshops, thereby ensuring marginal public exposure. All of this has changed, though, with the publication of this book. Holmgren provides us with a no-nonsense guide to permaculture, accessible to laypersons and scholars alike.
If you are interested in moving away from consumer dependency and becoming a responsible productive person, this book is for you. The skills and ideas imparted here are not only necessary for those who seek to create a healthful, sustainable way of life, they are empowering. In my opinion, permaculture is the best tool we have with which to begin creating a viable, perhaps more-than-merely-sustainable future.
To get an idea of what permaculture actually looks like on the ground, check out Ecovillage Living, by Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson, and visit the Crystal Waters Permaculture Village website.
A remarkable resource.
j.w.k.
Amid the cacophony of scholarly and political debate surrounding this issue, the hushed emergence of permaculture has by and large gone unnoticed. Defined as the use of systems thinking and design principles to consciously design "landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs," the permaculture concept is nothing less than the science of sustainability. And since the joint publication of Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (now out of print) by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-seventies, permaculture has become a veritable movement - a legitimate answer to the environmental and agricultural crises which plague humanity. Unfortunately, for the past twenty-five years, those who wished to learn more about permaculture were limited to joining expensive seminars and workshops, thereby ensuring marginal public exposure. All of this has changed, though, with the publication of this book. Holmgren provides us with a no-nonsense guide to permaculture, accessible to laypersons and scholars alike.
If you are interested in moving away from consumer dependency and becoming a responsible productive person, this book is for you. The skills and ideas imparted here are not only necessary for those who seek to create a healthful, sustainable way of life, they are empowering. In my opinion, permaculture is the best tool we have with which to begin creating a viable, perhaps more-than-merely-sustainable future.
To get an idea of what permaculture actually looks like on the ground, check out Ecovillage Living, by Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson, and visit the Crystal Waters Permaculture Village website.
A remarkable resource.
j.w.k.
40 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is for me a very important book, one of a handful that joins the Ecological Economics volumes crafted by Herman Daly and others, and also the Natural Capitalism endeavors of Paul Hawkin, Anthony Lovins. The author excels at rendering logical, sequential, and integrated concepts, all of which lead us to the inevitable conclusion--as the author intends--that human intellect, social networks, an appreciation for diversity as the foundation for cross-fertilization, and the enormous potential of the five billion poor--all suggest that a non-technological renaissance may be upon us, and that the bottom-up action of many minds could yet destroy the still-prevailing industrial, top-down control, centralizing of wealth through violence, and externalization of "true cost" to the unwitting public that no longer understands history or that the prevailing shadowy coalitions of bankers, corporate chieftains, private armies, spies, criminals, and terrorists.
My greatest surprise came at the very end, where the author provides a post-9/11 epilogue, and says: "There is abundant evidence that September 11 was an outcome of these shadowy coalitions, which link global energy corporations, US foreign policy, the global "intelligence community," Islamic fundamentalists, arms dealers, and illegal drug trade. Discussion of this bizarre symbiosis [elsewhere he puns on `Bush Laden'] remains beyond the pale of mainstream media....and is the best example of the paralysis of public discourse due to an absence of language to comprehend top-down thinking and bottom-up action as a new mode of power [sustainable community-oriented end-user driven values and behavior and investments].
Every page of this book offers up useful insights and compelling arguments for stopping the current immolation of the Earth and going back to 1491 and the holistic integration of systems ecology, landscape geography, ethno-biology, and cybernetics, along with the co-integration of ecological, cultural, economic, and political. Later in the book the author mentions the importance of integrating religion and science.
He is quite clear, quoting Stuart Hill, that first values must be defined, and only then can sustainable design begin. I have a note on holistic methods that use culture to integrate and promulgate psycho-social knowledge and wisdom with bio-ecological sustainable design.
The author provides a sharp critique of education today as reductionist, fragmented, rote, and disconnected from experience. In this vein, let me note that a World Bank official told me on the 21st of August that the CIA analysts that come to the World Bank in search of knowledge are "too young, lack knowledge, and have a propensity to put forward hypotheses (e.g. about Darfur and the region) that are frightening in their ignorance." On a positive note, while I have always been the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, I only entered into the top 100 and then the top 50 over-all, when Dick Cheney succeeded in frightening a significant portion of the population back into reading non-fiction. I consider it my sacred duty to be a human version of the Cliff Notes for all serious readers concerned about the future of the Republic.
The author specifies that the general public (that is to say, the 90% of us that have not looted the commonwealth but rather been subtly enslaved) is back to 1978 in terms of quality of life and sufficiency of income. All our hard word has enriched a few and left the Republic with bridges that collapse for lack of sustained investment in the public interest.
The author slams "just enough, just in time" logistics as unsustainable madness, and throughout the book, with both text and illustrations, shows how we must balance between "slow, steady, small" and "fast, random, big."
I liked the references to the role of the landscape as a means of storing energy, water, nutrients, and carbon. The author stresses the importance of understanding entropy (example from other work: water can be desalinated, but the energy cost, in the absence of renewable energy, is unaffordable over time). The author quotes Natural Capital many times, and I regard this book as a perfect complement to that strategic work--this is the operational, tactical, and technical counterpart. See also Priority One.
The author provides both maxims and principles in this book.
The maxims:
1. All observations are relative
2. Top-down thinking, bottom-up action
3. The landscape is the textbook
4. Failure is useful so long as we learn
5. Elegant solutions are simple, even invisible
6. Make the smallest intervention necessary
7. Avoid too much of a good thing
8. The problem is the solution
9. Recognize and break out of design cul-de-sacs
Permaculture design principles:
1. Observe and Interact
2. Catch and Store Energy
3. Obtain a Yield
4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback
5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
6. Produce No Waste
7. Design from Patterns to Details
8. Integrate Rather than Segregate
9. Use Small and Slow Solutions
10. Use and Value Diversity
11. Uses Edges and Value the Marginal
12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change
The author tells us that self-reliance is a form of consumer boycott and also a form of political action.
In addition to sustainable design, the author believes that maintenance engineering has a bright future.
He points out that recycling uses much more energy than re-use.
He notes that the failure of the elites to self-regulate their greed is a recurring problem (violent comprehensive revolutions are often set off when a precipitating outrage follows a long precondition of concentrated wealth and externalized waste).
The sins of the father will curse seven generation (similar to Native American concept of making consensual decisions that are known to be relevant seven generations into the future--what Stewart Brand calls the Clock of the Long Now.
The author emphasizes that the world's poor represent a vast pool of human resources and capabilities as well as (CKP's point) a four trillion dollar marketplace.
Other helpful books in this domain:
Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Diet for a Small Planet
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
My greatest surprise came at the very end, where the author provides a post-9/11 epilogue, and says: "There is abundant evidence that September 11 was an outcome of these shadowy coalitions, which link global energy corporations, US foreign policy, the global "intelligence community," Islamic fundamentalists, arms dealers, and illegal drug trade. Discussion of this bizarre symbiosis [elsewhere he puns on `Bush Laden'] remains beyond the pale of mainstream media....and is the best example of the paralysis of public discourse due to an absence of language to comprehend top-down thinking and bottom-up action as a new mode of power [sustainable community-oriented end-user driven values and behavior and investments].
Every page of this book offers up useful insights and compelling arguments for stopping the current immolation of the Earth and going back to 1491 and the holistic integration of systems ecology, landscape geography, ethno-biology, and cybernetics, along with the co-integration of ecological, cultural, economic, and political. Later in the book the author mentions the importance of integrating religion and science.
He is quite clear, quoting Stuart Hill, that first values must be defined, and only then can sustainable design begin. I have a note on holistic methods that use culture to integrate and promulgate psycho-social knowledge and wisdom with bio-ecological sustainable design.
The author provides a sharp critique of education today as reductionist, fragmented, rote, and disconnected from experience. In this vein, let me note that a World Bank official told me on the 21st of August that the CIA analysts that come to the World Bank in search of knowledge are "too young, lack knowledge, and have a propensity to put forward hypotheses (e.g. about Darfur and the region) that are frightening in their ignorance." On a positive note, while I have always been the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, I only entered into the top 100 and then the top 50 over-all, when Dick Cheney succeeded in frightening a significant portion of the population back into reading non-fiction. I consider it my sacred duty to be a human version of the Cliff Notes for all serious readers concerned about the future of the Republic.
The author specifies that the general public (that is to say, the 90% of us that have not looted the commonwealth but rather been subtly enslaved) is back to 1978 in terms of quality of life and sufficiency of income. All our hard word has enriched a few and left the Republic with bridges that collapse for lack of sustained investment in the public interest.
The author slams "just enough, just in time" logistics as unsustainable madness, and throughout the book, with both text and illustrations, shows how we must balance between "slow, steady, small" and "fast, random, big."
I liked the references to the role of the landscape as a means of storing energy, water, nutrients, and carbon. The author stresses the importance of understanding entropy (example from other work: water can be desalinated, but the energy cost, in the absence of renewable energy, is unaffordable over time). The author quotes Natural Capital many times, and I regard this book as a perfect complement to that strategic work--this is the operational, tactical, and technical counterpart. See also Priority One.
The author provides both maxims and principles in this book.
The maxims:
1. All observations are relative
2. Top-down thinking, bottom-up action
3. The landscape is the textbook
4. Failure is useful so long as we learn
5. Elegant solutions are simple, even invisible
6. Make the smallest intervention necessary
7. Avoid too much of a good thing
8. The problem is the solution
9. Recognize and break out of design cul-de-sacs
Permaculture design principles:
1. Observe and Interact
2. Catch and Store Energy
3. Obtain a Yield
4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback
5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
6. Produce No Waste
7. Design from Patterns to Details
8. Integrate Rather than Segregate
9. Use Small and Slow Solutions
10. Use and Value Diversity
11. Uses Edges and Value the Marginal
12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change
The author tells us that self-reliance is a form of consumer boycott and also a form of political action.
In addition to sustainable design, the author believes that maintenance engineering has a bright future.
He points out that recycling uses much more energy than re-use.
He notes that the failure of the elites to self-regulate their greed is a recurring problem (violent comprehensive revolutions are often set off when a precipitating outrage follows a long precondition of concentrated wealth and externalized waste).
The sins of the father will curse seven generation (similar to Native American concept of making consensual decisions that are known to be relevant seven generations into the future--what Stewart Brand calls the Clock of the Long Now.
The author emphasizes that the world's poor represent a vast pool of human resources and capabilities as well as (CKP's point) a four trillion dollar marketplace.
Other helpful books in this domain:
Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Diet for a Small Planet
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thought Provoking
I found the book a delight to read and thought provoking not only regarding permaculture gardening, but more about society culture. Read more
Published 1 month ago by David Crowther
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is amazing!
I recommend this book not only for confirmed permies like myself, but also for anyone wanting to know more about how man and nature fit together and not in separate spheres. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Kathy Shaw
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent introduction to principles
I found this book gave me an understanding of the ethic behind permaculture. This is not the book to help you design your garden. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Kerry E
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great Ideas needs better editing
I wanted to love this book but I felt it was so hard to read. Very creative and deep thinking but unless you have a pretty good understanding of permaculture this book might just... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Justin Lau
5.0 out of 5 stars
permaculture
Atypical Australian grasp on the looming problem of food shortages and land degredation, individual as well as community food self sufficiency / security. Read more
Published on March 13, 2011 by lifechange
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important actualization of the permaculture concept - essencial...
Well, here we have THE important actualization of the permaculture concepts for the new milenium-
I agree with many of the other reviewers, that this book is probably not an... Read more
I agree with many of the other reviewers, that this book is probably not an... Read more
Published on January 21, 2009 by H.Hieronimi
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good information but hard to read
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
I found this book incredibly hard to read. Read more
I found this book incredibly hard to read. Read more
Published on July 16, 2008 by Leanne
1.0 out of 5 stars
More numbers, less wisdom please!
In purchasing this book, I'd hoped to start learning the strategies and techniques for transforming a piece land into an environmentally sustainable legacy for future generations. Read more
Published on March 3, 2008 by Mulkerin Mark
5.0 out of 5 stars
Empowering
Reading this book, although in the beginning a bit of a dense and sluggish read, was a major pivotal moment for me. Read more
Published on January 26, 2008 by Oliver Smith Callis
3.0 out of 5 stars
A very intellectual book
This is a philosophical treatise on the underpinnings of permaculture. Not a gardening book as such, altho examples of gardening and landscaping are used to illustrate the... Read more
Published on October 24, 2007 by Samantha Macnicoll
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