[Scpg] Review Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability David Holmgren

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

hi everyone
         A new year begins , here is a review of David Holmgren New 
Book   Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, that 
has been reviewed by Wendy Smyer Yu in the current issue of Hopedance 
Magazine #42 Jan/Feb 2004, www.hopedance.org
         To order the book and support the Permaculture Community, the Book 
can be ordered from Permaculture Activist PO Box 1209 , Black Mountain, NC 
28711 cost $28, with $4 shipping. Go to the Activists Magazine 
www.permacultureactivists.org to see the whole range of Permaculture Books 
carried
                 wes  roe www.sbpermaculture.org



Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
David Holmgren
2002
Holmgren Design Services
16 Fourteenth Street
Hepburn, Victoria 3461
Australia
ISBN 0-646-41844-0

Review by Wendy Smyer Yu of Davis CA

         These days, in the midst of petroleum wars and blackouts, it’s 
amazingly taboo for mainstream media to discuss our energy addiction as 
such, or to suggest that Americans are energy abusers heading toward some 
sort of O.D./crash/potential rehab.  Gather with permaculturists, however, 
and it seems that’s the stuff of daily conversation, the impetus behind the 
movement.  David Holmgren, in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond 
Sustainability, sets out to provide design principles to understand the 
roots of our energy crisis and to fashion a new culture that can hopefully 
ride the rough waters ahead.
         Holmgren delineates twelve principles that characterize 
permaculture design and that will help us transition through the energy 
descent that will occur as petroleum supplies diminish.  These twelve 
principles are meant to provide guidelines and applications to all aspects 
of design and encourage alternative ways of thinking about long term costs 
and long term benefits.   For example, the way we view energy decline is 
culturally loaded, so that we consider growth as positive and stability or 
decline as negative factors that we devote more energy to 
boosting.  Starting from the premise that a capitalist worldview, which 
perceives continued growth as the only indication of success, is counter to 
ecological principles, Holmgren says, “We have trouble visualizing decline 
as positive, but this simply reflects the dominance of our prior culture of 
growth. Permaculture is a whole-hearted adaptation to the ecological 
realities of decline which are as natural and creative as those of growth.”
         A superficial (chronologically speaking) consideration of energy 
descent focuses on a fear-filled future - replete with looting, rioting, 
starvation, mass migration, and war, but a serious look at permaculture and 
implementation of its principles can offer a positive perspective about 
human life after energy gluttony.  Understanding humanity’s energy usage in 
biological/ecological terms it is apparent that we have followed nature’s 
patterns remarkably well.  A system characterized by excessive energy is 
filled with diversity, rapid change, and instability.  When energy surplus 
is consumed the system either crashes or, creatively, it uses that energy 
to settle into a low energy stability that stores limited energy more 
efficiently.
         The first principle considered by Holmgren prepares the ground for 
the subsequent principles, showing the foundation of permaculture.  Of the 
principle “Observe and Interact,” Holmgren writes, “Good design depends on 
a free and harmonious relationship to nature and people
[o]bservation and 
interaction involve a two-way process between subject and object, the 
designer and the system.”  The key to designing for a low-energy future, he 
suggests, is the need to recognize patterns and relations, something 
difficult in our society which honors reductionist thinking and prefers 
mediated or secondary information.
         What makes this book truly heartening, and relevant today, is that 
the focus on global change grows forth from a very grounded locus of 
action, namely with individuals, households, and communities which seek to 
increase self-reliance.   Holmgren writes, “Learning to think wholistically 
requires an overriding, or reversal, of much of the cultural heritage of 
the last few hundred years.  With little experience of whole-system 
thinking and such cultural impediments, we need to focus our efforts on 
simple and accessible whole systems before we try to amend large and 
complex ones.  The self is the most accessible and potentially 
comprehensible whole system.”  Permaculture is, at heart, a personal 
movement - one that insists we refrain from judging personal change as 
something less than any sort of “mass’ movement not grounded in fundamental 
personal responsibility.  A future for humanity beyond just sustaining 
things as they are and that actively embraces the creativity of change in 
descent requires that we offer our utmost commitment in our own lives on 
outward into larger spheres of influence.  David Holmgren’s new book 
clarifies and simplifies the tools and principles on which to base that 
commitment for great good.