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Home Alive! permaculture landscape at Everdale Place, 2004
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Permaculture is a design methodology that offers immeasurable hope for a
sustainable future. The term, coined in 1959 by Bill Mollison, a British Tanzanian, is a shortening of ‘permanent agriculture’, or ‘permanent
culture’. Permaculture provides practical answers to questions about human
settlement and wise use of the earth, its energy and resources. Hence, permaculture
landscapes mirror patterns of diverse, stable ecosystems to create
profitable, productive and sustainable ‘cultivated environments’.
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Permaculture ultimately embodies a healthy, equitable and ‘best-care’
approach to the land and its inhabitants. In so doing it is a
philosophy whose time has come. To begin, one
must be aware of permaculture principles expressed through place, time, biodiversity,
and people.
Permaculture Principles
 | Nature is the ultimate designer and our ultimate teacher. Living systems
show a creative order that seemingly arise out of entropy. We must work with
life rather than against it. |
| Whatever we take, we must return. Material cycling forms a basis for the stability and
richness of sustainable ecosystems. |
| One makes the least change for the greatest effect. The placement of elements
relative to each other results in 'beneficial mutualism' that increases overall
function. |
| Diversity forms the basis for redundancy, which under flux
results in readjustment and stability. |
| Every element has more than one function; every function is achieved by more
than one element. |
| Successful site design arises out of marrying the land’s unique attributes
with a human response that protects nature’s capital, takes only what is
needed and shares any surplus.
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| Permaculture designs tend to reduce one's Ecological
Footprint. It easily adapts to and fits in with real-life application of
The Natural Step, true Smart Growth, Eksitics, LEED, Green Globes, Life
Cycle Costing and other organizing frameworks for sustainability. |
Permaculture can form the underpinning to community
design and land management wherever sustainability, health, and affordability
are practiced.
Scales of Application
Permaculture has typically been practiced at the site level; at the scale of
individual properties. It can also be applied at the neighbourhood scale
or indeed within the eco-community, municipality or region. C. Brad Peterson
Environmental Management and Landscape Architecture is working on applying
permaculture principles in this context.
| Permaculture is an ideal design tool to apply with
eco-village and healthy green community planning and design, and to use in the
design and management of individual properties. |
Home Alive! permaculture landscape at Everdale, 2004
Projects List
Indeed, permaculture is ‘in the background’ in almost every project
carried out by C. Brad Peterson Environmental Management and Landscape
Architecture. Brad Peterson designed the first permaculture farm plan in
Ontario, the O’Sullivan Farm Plan near Arthur, ON, in 1988. Since then, Brad
has worked on many projects where permaculture principles are expressed either
very explicitly, or form a quiet but integral reference to the function and
placement of site elements, the sequencing of exterior spaces and the overall
function of the project.
Most projects listed in the Sustainable
Landscapes and Conservation Development and Property Environmental
Management and Land Stewardship headings on the Projects
page are based in Permaculture design.
Home Alive! permaculture
landscape at Everdale, 2004
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