Customer Reviews

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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_.

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.

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)

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 theories. I found it enjoyable, but not light reading. I would reccommend it, if you have an intellectual craving for deep ecological understanding.

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability

I found this book incredibly hard to read.

I couldn't wrap my head around Holmgren's style of prose, and the layout and ideas in this book. It is wordy, meandering, and confusing - and I found myself lost in chapter after chapter as Holmgren's explanations went way over my head, leaving me confused and befuddled. This would not be a good introduction to permaculture, and no good at all as a teaching book or textbook.

I wish I could have given this book a higher rating than two stars, but I simply wouldn't recommend it to any but the diehard permaculture enthusiast who feels s/he must have every book on the subject in her/his possession.

I feel that Holmgren has somehow missed the simplicity of permaculture and become bogged down in unnecessary complexity, taking his readers with him. He presents a neat little set of diagrams, but I lost touch with what to do with them early on, and it was all downhill from there. Maybe the book improved towards the end, but as I never finished it I shall never know. Which is a shame.

Holmgren has done wonderful work in the field of permaculture and sustainability. His record in the field is commendable. I feel sad I can't recommend this book. I hope his next venture is more readable.

From now on, I'll stick with Mollison (the father and founder of permaculture) whose books I have found to be all incredibly readable, intelligent, and action-provoking.

it's not the nuts and bolts of how to do permaculture, it's the abstract basic reasoning that guides your thoughts when you come across something new.

Reading this book, although in the beginning a bit of a dense and sluggish read, was a major pivotal moment for me. Holmgren presents a visionary perspective and context of humanity's position, provides profound and thought provoking discourse on the underlying philosophies and patterns of permaculture design, and projects an image of an inspiring future and a path to get there with confidence.

Once I got to the second half of the book, the pace picked up and I felt positively engaged right through to the end. It has supplied me with valuable tools and concepts which I use and refer to almost daily, as I am confronted by the bull-headed, sometimes irrational, sometimes blatantly parasitic structures humanity has surrounded itself with.

But Homgren's greatest gift to me, from the end of the book, was his argument for not needing to denigrate our forebears' roles in the situation we find ourselves in today; especially as permaculture design provides us with some of the key tools of thought that will empower us in todays times of monstrous change. This really helped me to release any stress I was creating around blame, freeing up that mental space to be employed in creative problem solving.

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. Perhaps, I misunderstood the book's description when it specified that it would teach me the foundations of permaculture design and the 12 permaculture design principles.

Instead of providing a useful guide to designing a more sustainable environment for someone who wants to change their lifestyle for their own philosophical and ethical beliefs, the book takes one on 277 page New Age ramble. Rather than offering sound scientific reasons why permaculture offers a reasonable path through climate change and likely energy declines, the author offers platitudes and dubious claims.

I was bounced from preferences for traditional cultures (never mind traditions like female circumcision or traditional building methods that collapse in earthquakes) to citations of Hari Krishna practices as something to emulate to anti-patriarchal graphs and ending with a profound sense of disappointment. Yes, Mr. Holmgren, you can be a male Western scientific materialist and still want to create a sustainable environment and society for your children.

I read this book and could see how this thinking about use and re-use, planning and observing will help not just my garden but my life. Really useful examples of each principle and in depth discussion of what they mean, how they can be applied in lots of cases.

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 easy read, since here Holmgren goes into a deep and profound analisis of ecological and systemic concepts. My tip - read this book slowly, two to five pages are enough, and than go out in the garden and experience....citing Permaculture Principle number 1: "Observe and Interact"....
This book is probably not something for beginners, who want to have practical tips on how to make a garden (well, there is enough literature around on that issue), nevertheless I consider it essencial reading for those folks who have some experience in sustaiability issues and some permaculture design practice - this book changed my life, and reinspired my more than 19 year permaculture experiences and practices.
Permaculture is much more than just a curious gardening filosofy, and here the lesser known co-originator of the concept destilles his 25 year or more practical permaculture experience in his twelve deep and empowering permaculture principles, that challenge most of the more mainstreamish sustainability concepts. Holmgren is an incredible conceptualizer.
This is a book for all those people, who are seriously interested in permaculture design/practice and sustainability issues. Also, I like Holmgrens more reflective and modest style, that contrasts a bit the more polemic, straightforward and sometimes provocative style of Mollisons permaculture Books - Highly recommended !!!