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Chapters from the paperback
- Introduction
- Ecocriticism
- Optimisation
- Grounded Economic Awareness
- Advertising Awareness
- Transition Skills
- Commons Thinking
- Effortless Action
- Permaculture Design
- Community Gardening
- Ecological Intelligence
- Systems Thinking
- Gaia Awareness
- Futures Thinking
- Values Reflection and the Earth Charter
- Social Conscience
- New Media Literacy
- Cultural Literacy
- Carbon Capability
- Greening Business
- Materials Awareness
- Appropriate Technology and Appropriate Design
- Technology Appraisal
- Complexity, Systems Thinking and Practice
- Coping with Complexity
- Emotional Wellbeing
- Finding Meaning Without Consuming
- Being in the World
- Beauty as a Way of Knowing
- Citizen Engagement
- Re-Educating the Person
- Institutional Transformation
- A Learning Society
- Additional chapters
- Interviews
Home » The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy » Chapters from the paperback » Permaculture Design
Permaculture Design
Permaculture Design: designing our lives with nature as the model. Patrick Whitefield, author of The Earth Care Manual: a permaculture handbook for Britain and other temperate climates
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The essence of permaculture is that it takes natural ecosystems as the model for our own farms, gardens, buildings and settlements. In most parts of the world where agriculture is possible the natural ecosystem is woodland or forest. The annual production of biomass in a woodland is greater than in a typical agricultural system, such as a wheat field, because more niches are filled. In plain terms the woodland is three-dimensional where the wheat field is two-dimensional. To produce this biomass it needs none of the energy and other inputs which agriculture needs. Present day agriculture is so energy-intensive that on average, by the time food reaches our plates, ten calories of fossil fuel have been expended for every one contained in the food. Nor does the natural ecosystem produce any of the negative ecological impacts of agriculture, such as enhanced soil erosion.
